South Asian Studies, 2023
Vol. 39, No. 2, 207–228, https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2023.2287840
Routes of Translation: Connected Book Histories and al-Jazari’s
Robotic Wonders from the Mamluks to Mandu
Vivek Gupta*
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Over the course of the long fifteenth century, scholars and books moved across regions and spurred transcreations of
numerous Islamicate manuscripts in South Asia. This essay undertakes a close reading of an early sixteenth-century
Persian transcreation—that is, a translation in both form and content—of a twelfth-century Arabic compendium on
mechanical devices. I examine what the historical event of translation in the South Asian region of Malwa and town
of Mandu meant as it is read amidst cultural flows between Mamluk Egypt, Yemen, Mecca, and Hindustan. By
analyzing the colophons of early Arabic copies of al-Jazari’s Compendium of Theory and Useful Practice for the
Fabrication of Machines along with Da’ud Shadiyabadi’s Wonders of Mechanics in Persian, this study demonstrates
how Shadiyabadi’s translation distances itself from al-Jazari’s book. As Shadiyabadi’s Wonders of Mechanics becomes
the standard Persian translation of al-Jazari—appearing in subsequent Mughal and Iranian copies—the work of
a scholar from a small North-Central Indian court links scholars, sultanates, and regions.
Keywords: Translation; manuscript studies; transregional; Malwa; connected histories; al-Jazari; automata
Introduction: Transregional, Translation, Transcreation
The Wonders of Mechanics (‘Ajā’ib al-Ṣanā‘ī) in Persian
by Dā’ūd Shādiyābādī was not the first text to transmit
knowledge of automata in the North-Central Indian region
of Malwa. In the early eleventh century, the Paramāra king
Bhoja (ca. 1000–1055) described many kinds of mechanical devices in Sanskrit in his Stories for the Bouquet of
Love (Śṛṅgāramañjārīkathā).1 Bhoja’s capital was in Dhār,
the original seat of the Malwa sultanate before its capital
moved to Mandu.2 Bhoja’s Stories for the Bouquet of Love
included automata (yantras) and water clocks apparently
adapted from Greek sources.3 Some 150 years later,
around the same time of the emergence of a sultanate in
Delhi, a scholar thousands of miles away in Jazira
(Mesopotamia) named Ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī composed
the Compendium of Theory and Useful Practice for the
Fabrication of Machines in Arabic (al-Jāmi‘ bayn al-‘ilm
w’al-‘amal al-nāfi‘ fī ṣinā‘at al-ḥiyal, henceforth referred to
as the Compendium).4 As a standard for scientific knowledge, this Arabic work was steadily copied for several
centuries, which enabled its translation in sixteenthcentury Malwa. In Shadiyabadi’s Mandu, al-Jazari arrived
in the land of King Bhoja.
The first known copy of the Wonders of Mechanics
is dated 1508 (British Library Or 13718). Shadiyabadi
made this translation for his patron Sultan Nasir Shah
Khalji (r. 1500–1510) of Malwa. For historians, the
sultanate of Malwa, established by Dilavar Khan Ghuri
in 1401 has held an esteemed position in the list of socalled regional sultanates that flourished between the
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The reigns of two
sultans—Hushang Shah (r. 1406–1435) and Ghiyas alDin (r. 1469–1500)—have especially commanded the
attention of scholarship for both their military and cultural achievements, while the reign of Sultan Nasir Shah
has been relatively neglected.
In contrast to political histories that understand the
ambitions and activities of these rulers as expressions of
regional power, this essay argues that from the perspective of intellectual and book histories that the court culture of Mandu, even as it was distinctive, saw itself as part
of a broader transregional network, one that straddled the
vast spaces of the Islamicate world. I demonstrate this
connection by a method I call “connected book histories,”
extending Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s “connected histories”
to the field of manuscript studies.5 Reflecting on the
impact of this method on the “early modern in South
Asia,” Rosalind O’Hanlon states that “the result [of the
connected histories approach] has been a suggestive new
framework for understanding mobility and transcultural
*E-mail: vg356@cam.ac.uk
Present Affiliation for Vivek Gupta is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University College London, London, United
Kingdom
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not
altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the
author(s) or with their consent.
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V. Gupta
possibilities that characterized early modern Eurasia’s
royal courts.”6 This essay traces the movement of people,
books, and manuscripts reflected in Shadiyabadi’s transcreation, the Wonders of Mechanics. In doing so,
I demonstrate that a close analysis of the processes of
transcreation reveals how Shadiyabadi sought to make alJazari legible to his immediate region of Malwa, all the
while participating in a wider circulation of manuscripts.
Even though a ruler commissioned Shadiyabadi’s translation, its earliest copy is much humbler in scale and finish
than some of the other royal commissions at Mandu, such
as the famed Book of Delights or Ni‘matnāmah. Other
imperial objects such as the Mughal album with its inclusion and responses to European prints and Persian calligraphy is a natural candidate for a connected book
histories approach.7 While courtly albums exemplify
some of the fanciest objects and the one percent of bookmaking, a work like the Wonders of Mechanics draws
a different picture. It gives us a sense of bookish scholars
and manuscript makers in collaboration, albeit with court
patronage lurking in the background.
I demonstrate how connected book histories fruitfully
illuminates the development of a transregional scholarly
culture of Islamicate sciences in South Asia through
a micro-level analysis of colophons, diagrams, images,
notations, and language. Unlike books that may have been
committed to memory and transferred through orality
such as poetry or the Qur’an, the corpus of books under
consideration here illustrates how one book led directly to
another in this period. Scribes of al-Jazari manuscripts
often insisted that the book was transferred from the hand
of the author, not only in its text but also in its diagrams.
This kept the author alive for them through a direct connection spanning long distances and centuries.
Previous scholarship has contributed to the study of
connected book histories of the contexts studied here and
reminds us of points of disconnection and reinterpretation. Elizabeth Lambourn has examined the material
forms of writing and containment of a late thirteenthcentury illegible letter from a Sri Lankan ruler to the
Mamluk court of sultan al-Mansur al-Qalawun (r. 1280–
90) in Cairo.8 Lambourn urges us to consider whether
a medium of long-distance communication would be legible as a letter in the first place, and the probability of oral
transmission when a text does not transfer the message.
The Sri Lankan letter also serves as a salient example of
disconnection despite the centuries of diplomatic
exchange across the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.
Regarding manuscript evidence, Christopher Bahl has
mapped the transmission of Arabic texts, especially grammars, across the Western Indian Ocean (ca. 1400–1700).9
Bahl shows that the text need not be translated as
Shadiyabadi translates al-Jazari for it to gain entirely
new meanings in a South Asian context.
The preponderance of original works linked with
the patronage of the Malwa sultanate—the Wonders of
Mechanics, a multilingual illustrated dictionary, and the
Ni‘matnāmah—suggests how this small regional, but
well-networked court, shaped its world through multilingual books. The book culture of Malwa and its capital Mandu are not necessarily unique for the long
fifteenth century. Rather, their survival enables us to
reimagine the world of Shadiyabadi, as he was just one
of many of his kind.
Shadiyabadi’s Wonders of Mechanics gives us a sense
of his care for the subtleties of language and how he
deployed it as a translator. His scholarly propensities
provide insights into what Francesca Orsini has called
a “local cosmopolitan”: a multilingual intellectual who
mediates a larger cosmopolitan world for his local context. His works strategically incorporated new communities in Shadiyabad (the “City of Joy,” or Mandu) into
adaptive knowledge systems. I have elsewhere analyzed
his Key of the Learned (Miftāḥ al-Fużalā’), a multilingual
Persian dictionary written in 1468, that survives in the
form of an illustrated manuscript attributable to the
1490s.10 The Key of the Learned’s use of Hindavi words,
often as clarifying synonyms for Persian entries, reveals
an ease with moving between Hindavi and Persian. Here,
I call attention to how Shadiyabadi sprinkled occasional
Hindavi words in his Persian to gloss terms for local
readers.
It is also worth noting that a close look at al-Jazari’s
original Arabic work reveals him to be a local cosmopolitan as well. Al-Jazari freely calques Persian words
into Arabic and marshals a range of Greek and Arabic
sources to produce his compendium.11 His Persian
within Arabic speaks of the diversity of the intellectual
milieu of twelfth-century Jazira.
This essay maps the circuitous routes of Shadiyabadi’s
translation, the Wonders of Mechanics, at its moment of
transcreation—that is, a translation in both form and
content—from Arabic into Persian at the beginning of
the sixteenth century.12 Through an evaluation of this
book’s transcreation in Hindustan, I examine its implications for connected book histories during the long fifteenth century, from the moment of Timur’s invasions of
Delhi in 1398 until the rise of the Mughal dynasty in the
mid-sixteenth century.13 I then situate the transmission of
this work against the historical evidence of transregional
currents that connected the Mamluk and Malwa sultanates, if the Wonders of Mechanics attests to a much earlier Arabic source, rather than another, more proximate
intermediary.
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Locating the Wonders of Mechanics in the
Manuscript Tradition of al-Jazari’s Compendium
The British Library’s manuscript of the Wonders of
Mechanics contains 191 folios with 159 technical diagrams
of clocks, drinking vessels, liquid containers, fountains,
and machines for raising water. It is modestly sized, measuring 22 × 14.5 cm, with roughly 21 lines of naskh text
per folio. It entered the British Library’s collection in 1976
purchased via sale at Sotheby’s and was first published in J.
P. Losty’s 1982 catalogue of the British Library’s Indian
manuscripts.14 Its pages were pruned when it was rebound
at His Majesty’s Stationary Office Bindery in 1978, leaving
several diagrams trimmed. Because of the rough surface of
its paper many drawings have rubbed onto opposite sides
of the page. The diagrams of the manuscript reinterpret
Artuqid and Mamluk models, although they often differ in
scale and proportions (Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 2. Main drawing of figures and water mechanisms;
from the category (naw‘) of the Arbiters of Drinking Sessions
Wonders of Mechanics of Shadiyabadi, Mandu, 1509, Folio:
23.2 × 15.7 cm, British Library Or 13718, f. 120b. © British
Library Board.
Figure 1. Main drawing of figures and water mechanisms;
from the category (naw‘) of the Arbiters of Drinking Sessions,
Compendium of Theory and Useful Practice for the
Fabrication of Machines of al-Jazari, Probably Mamluk
Syria, 1315, Folio: 30.9 x 20.4. F1932.19.
The British Library’s copy of the Wonders of
Mechanics is the only known copy likely contemporary
with Shadiyabadi. A scribe copied the codex of British
Library Or 13718 in November/December 1508 (914 A.
H.) and it was authenticated on 26 January 1509 (915 A.
H.).15 The verification note, possibly by Shadiyabadi himself, appears adjacent to the manuscript’s colophon.16
I have identified five later undated copies, which suggest
that the Wonders of Mechanics became one of the standard Persian translations of al-Jazari’s Compendium.17
Even though it is listed in most surveys of sultanate
manuscripts, the Wonders of Mechanics has received the
least attention of Mandu’s books to date.18 Scholars of alJazari’s Compendium have overlooked it, although they
cite other, later Persian translations.19
The devices described in Wonders of Mechanics were
probably never realized in Mandu, but that is not to say
that its knowledge did not help Mandu’s craftsmen
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V. Gupta
understand how to harness mechanical skills. Al-Jazari
adapted his text from the Abbasid Banū Mūsā who relied
on ancient Greek sources such as the treatise on automata
by Philo of Byzantium of the third century B.C.20 A clock
similar to that described by al-Jazari was possibly made in
the twelfth century at the Eastern entrance of the Great
Mosque of Damascus.21 This clock and an earlier tenthcentury one, neither of which are extant, both interested
Mamluk historians, which may suggest some of the
Mamluks’ motivations for commissioning so many copies
of al-Jazari’s work.22 My study of the early Arabic illustrated manuscripts of al-Jazari and of the Wonders of
Mechanics thus negotiates the transmission of classical
knowledge of automata in a world where its physical
manifestations are far more challenging to trace.23
Popular knowledge of automata also circulated
widely within Persian wonders-of-creation (‘ajā’ib almakhlūqāt) books by Zakariyya’ al-Qazwini (d. 1283).
The earliest known Persian copy of al-Qazwini dates to
1300 and contains descriptions of crafts and
automata.24 Only in the fifteenth century did artists
start illustrating the sections on the automata in these
manuscripts.25 Such compendia of wonders too circulated directly between Iran and Hindustan, and Mandu
received such books.26
The traffic between Iran and Hindustan is the
cause we would most likely suspect for how the
Wonders of Mechanics surfaced. The historical evidence for Iran and sultanate relations is vast. But,
given the visual qualities of the Wonders of
Mechanics, al-Jazari’s circulation, and the scattered
Mamluk-Mandu connections, we cannot rule out
direct cultural flows from the Mamluk world. It is
improbable that the single copy of established
Artuqid provenance was the source of the Wonders
of Mechanics, when there are far more copies of
Mamluk origins.27
The earliest manuscript of al-Jazari’s Compendium
was composed in 1206 shortly after the work was written
in Diyār Bakr/Āmid under the patronage of the Artuqid
sultan Nāṣir al-Dīn (r. 1200–39).28 Thereafter it was
copied steadily in Mamluk domains29 until its first
extant Indian version and translation, namely the
Wonders of Mechanics.
The lasting interest in al-Jazari’s book, despite its
age, is attested by the fact that Nasir al-Din Khalji (r.
1500–10) commanded Shadiyabadi to produce
a translation of the Banu Musa’s Kitāb al-Ḥiyal, but
Shadiyabadi chose al-Jazari’s work instead. 30 His decision to produce a Persianised Compendium may relate
to its availability and the Kitāb al-Ḥiyal’s absence. It
also may express Shadiyabadi’s high regard for alJazari as a scholar.
Concurrently, at the Bahmani sultanate just south of
Malwa in the Deccan, Maḥmūd Shāh II Bahmanī (r.
1482–1512) commanded his court secretary Nīmdihī to
translate the Kitāb al-Ḥiyal as well. 31 One wonders
whether Nimdihi too chose al-Jazari instead of the
Banu Musa, or al-Jazari and the Banu Musa’s works
were simply thought of as the same thing. To my
knowledge, Nimdihi’s translation does not survive leaving these questions unanswerable. Nevertheless,
Persian translations of Arabic works on automata
appear as parallel cultural impulses in at least two
regions of sultanate India, the Deccan and Malwa.
Around the turn of the sixteenth century, two other
key manuscripts of al-Jazari’s Compendium were copied, dated 1485 and 1486, the latter of which is the
primary source for Donald Hill’s English translation. 32
These two copies shed light on how al-Jazari’s work
was treated outside of India at a time roughly contemporary with the Wonders of Mechanics. After the
Wonders of Mechanics, there remain nine extant alJazari-related manuscripts produced in India, three of
which were al-Jazari’s work itself. 33 The circumstances
under which Shadiyabadi accessed a manuscript of alJazari’s Arabic text to produce his work—whether he
travelled or read the text in India itself—is a matter
that can only entertain informed speculation. As
I propose here, long-distance circulation and
a network of madrasahs between Mandu, Egypt, and
Mecca, are possible conduits by which Shadiyabadi
came across al-Jazari’s Compendium.
The extant evidence of the al-Jazari manuscript
tradition reveals the desire to authenticate the manuscript’s lineage (silsilah) tracing back to the original
author’s hand. Such overt allusions to transfer found
in colophons provide granular evidence of connected
book histories. An al-Jazari manuscript dated 1485,
now housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
illustrates such concerns. Its colophon states,
This book was completed, blessings for its owner, at
sunset on Friday, 4 April 1485. The copy from which
I transferred its diagrams was completed 20 July 1341.
That manuscript was transmitted from the best copy, also
from which I transmitted this copy. Those that are like it,
and this copy, derive their text from the copy that was in
the hand of the author. The letters, variants, and drawings of the devices are as he drew them with a ruler
and freehand, blessings to the greatest God. That copy
was completed on 16 January 1206.34
At first glance, this colophon implicates a long practice
of copying al-Jazari’s Compendium, because the scribe
writes, “this copy and those that are like it/al-nuskhah
mā mithālahi.” He identifies two key manuscripts: first,
the copy from which he based his work upon created in
1341, and second, the original, “mother,” manuscript
South Asian Studies
made in 1206. From the 1206 original manuscript to the
1341 copy, to the BnF copy made in 1485, the scribe
inscribes his copy within a good genealogy tracing back
to the hand of the original author and scribe.35
That every detail of the original manuscript—its
“letters, variants, and drawings of the devices/al-ḥurūf
wa’l-ibdāl wa rasūm ṣūrat al-ashkāl”—are as al-Jazari
drew them merits our attention for understanding processes of transmission. 36 And yet, the finish of the
manuscripts in the al-Jazari corpus varies drastically.
The 1485 copy, the colophon from which I quote above,
for instance, contains wholly unfinished diagrams.
Some spaces where the diagrams should occur are left
blank. 37 In other cases, the image is completely pared
down to the constitutive outlines, lacking any details or
figures (Figure 3). 38 The image that corresponds to
a main drawing of a water clock, typically one of the
liveliest images in the entirety of early manuscripts of
al-Jazari’s Compendium, appears plainly as the
Figure 3. Incomplete drawing of zodiac clock, Compendium
of Theory and Useful Practice for the Fabrication of Machines
of al-Jazari, Dated 1485, Folio: 27 × 18.3 cm, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Arabe 2477, f. 8b.
211
architectural frames of the alcove and reception chamber in which musicians would have been drawn. The
drawing’s tentative red horizontal drafting lines,
matched with those of the gridlines (misṭarah) from
the opposite facing folio, suggest that this composition
may have been transferred from another copy using
a pounce. The spacing of the lines in these frames
corresponds to the gridlines of the text page on the
verso side of the folio. The artist has painted ochre
and blue to demarcate the structures of certain architectural features such as the dome and pillars. The bare
spaces are where figures would have been added at
a later stage. Despite the unfinished state of these diagrams, the colophon still claims that the manuscript is
finished, perhaps only from the perspective of its text.
This suggests that the manuscript’s scribe and artist
were probably different individuals, and that the processes of writing and illustrating occurred in different
phases.
Ample physical evidence of transfer mechanisms in
the al-Jazari corpus signifies an intent to adhere to
a prescribed programme of diagrams within these
manuscripts. Two largely incomplete books on automata that postdate the Wonders of Mechanics by several
centuries bear such evidence of copying. For example,
we find tracings of diagrams in an eighteenth-century
edited selection of different treatises on automata
including al-Jazari’s.39 Comparing the tracing with the
diagram of an image of a vessel we can deduce that
these are copies of each other, however it is not certain
which came first.40 A later Iranian Persian translation
dated 1874 contains tracing papers with French color
codes.41 This manuscript has several blank spaces
where illustrations would have been appropriate.
A French copyist has inserted tracings from an earlier
Arabic manuscript and added these tracing papers
within the manuscript. Taken together, these much
later copies and the 1485 manuscript attest to an effort
to preserve an “original” programme of the diagrams,
which may have much to do with establishing the
credibility of a manuscript’s transmission.
Regarding the text, the Wonders of Mechanics
makes the translator’s agency clear, and its composition
marks a rupture in the transmission of the Arabic
Compendium. Despite its close adherence to al-Jazari’s
work, Shadiyabadi’s act of translation distances it from
the Arabic text—connection begets disconnection. In
his introduction, Shadiyabadi identifies himself as the
author, and his patron as Sultan Nasir Shah Khalji of
Malwa, one of the patrons of Mandu’s Ni‘matnāmah.42
Shadiyabadi’s short introduction contains preface identifies him as the author of the text and explains the six
larger typologies (anwā‘) of mechanical arts within
which numerous smaller sub-sections of forms
(ashkāl) and sub-sub-sections (afṣāl) are nested.
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V. Gupta
While the frontispiece of BL Or 13718 is modern and
the later scribe wrote a new text for that page,
Shadiyabadi’s original prefatory text can be recovered
from the manuscript’s later Mughal copy.43 The similarity of the diction of the Mughal copy’s first few lines
and that of Mandu’s Key of the Learned’s gives further
reason to this claim.44 After its colophon, the text also
bears a standard table of the letters used to label parts
of devices within the diagrams, and a glossary of technical terms with vernacular equivalents, which is not in
al-Jazari’s Compendium.45
For the most part, Shadiyabadi adheres to al-Jazari’s
book as he calques Arabic technical vocabulary into
Persian with ease. Like al-Jazari, he instructs his readers as to how the automata are made in his own firstperson voice. Al-Jazari, for instance, describes his
experiments with some of his devices. When devising
the very first water clock in the Compendium he states,
“I made an instrument according to this pattern, but it
did not work correctly./fa‘amaltu ālah ‘alā hādhahi alṣūrah falam yasaḥḥa bihā ‘l-‘amal.”46 Shadiyabadi
mimics this in Persian: “I made this instrument in the
described format, but it did not work correctly/bas
sākhtam ‘amal-i ālat barīn ṣūrat kih namūdah shud
ammā badān ‘amal ṣaḥīḥ nashud.”47 In comparison to
the Compendium dated 1486, Shadiyabadi elides only
one full section towards the end of al-Jazari’s text, and
appends two devices not included in the Compendium
after the Wonders of Mechanics concludes.48 Overall, it
seems as if Shadiyabadi diligently translates al-Jazari
into Persian although he never mentions him by
name.49
Regarding the British Library’s manuscript of the
Wonders of Mechanics, we can safely state that
Shadiyabadi, another scholar, or a scribe verified it
the year after it was copied in 1508. Throughout the
book, several glosses and corrections appear in the
margins and on the text itself. These textual edits
occur more frequently towards the beginning of the
manuscript than at the end. The similarity in the handwriting between the word ṣaḥīḥ (correct) in the verification note and in a note where the scholar corrects his
own redaction, or one of a previous editor’s, stating, “it
is correct, it is not incorrect/ṣaḥīḥ ast ghalaṭ nīst,”
suggests that the same individual responsible for
authenticating the text also attended to its body text.50
Whether this individual was Shadiyabadi himself is
unknown, but the dating of the note and corrections
reasonably fits within his lifespan.
Akin to Shadiyabadi’s rendering of al-Jazari in text,
the Wonders of Mechanics follows the technical drawings of al-Jazari’s Compendium closely. When
compared with the 1486 copy of al-Jazari, the artist
completed all but two corresponding drawings.51 In
both instances, empty space is allocated for the illustration that may raise the possibility that the scribe and
artist were different individuals, or that writing and
drawing occurred in successive phases. The finished
illustrations are executed in red and brown ink with
fillings of ochre, green, blue, pink, brown and red
watercolors (Figure 2). Except for the modern frontispiece, there is no illumination in the manuscript.52 In
comparison to the 1486 al-Jazari manuscript, figures
and animals are frequently omitted in the Wonders of
Mechanics and even further redacted in the later
Mughal version. In such diagrams—made for the
expressed purpose of communicating technical knowledge—the non-mechanical figures would have likely
been added during the final stage of the drawing
process.53
Throughout the Compendium, al-Jazari frequently
comments on the purpose of his diagrams. At the end
of his description of a technical mechanism operating
one of his water clocks that includes representations of
musicians he writes, “no picture is needed for the
trumpeter, since he makes no movement, and the
sound of the trumpet comes from another source.”54
The impetus to clarify how the device (ḥiyal) works
motivates al-Jazari to provide images (ṣuwwar, mithāl).
Even if al-Jazari did not make the technical drawings
himself, this rationale provides insight into why an
image would be extraneous. Hence, the diagrams are
instrumental for transmitting functional information
that text does not necessarily convey.
The style of the diagrams in the Wonders of
Mechanics strikes one as the product of a sultanate artist
trained in a Persian practice who was looking at a much
earlier Arabic manuscript of al-Jazari, possibly of
Mamluk provenance, for inspiration. Let us take some
of the basic elements of the Key of the Learned’s paintings
as comparisons to the Wonders of Mechanics’ diagrams.
First, consider two corresponding representations of
musicians. In Shadiyabadi’s illustrated definition of the
stringed instrument (chang) from the Key of the Learned
we see two musicians, one holding a drum and the other
the chang (Figure 4).55 They are entertaining a courtier
who offers them some wine. The figures sit kneeling and
are shown in three-quarter profile view. They wear lightly
adorned flowing robes (jāmahs) that cross at the neck,
and are painted teal, indigo, and red. The artist carefully
depicts the individual white folds of their turbans with
a shaft at the centre.56 Another band appears in the
Wonders of Mechanics’ illustration of an automatic boat
situated on a pool for a drinking party (Figure 5).57 Here,
the figures are not human, but are life-like representations
South Asian Studies
Figure 4. Stringed instrument (chang), Key of the Learned of
Shadiyabadi, Mandu, ca. 1490, Folio: 33 × 25.4 cm; Painted
surface: 8.1 × 11.9 cm, British Library Or 3299, f. 98b. ©
British Library Board.
attached to a large-scale ship. Elements familiar from Key
of the Learned appear. Figures are shown in three-quarter
profiles and the folds of their turbans part in the middle.
The tambourine and chang players hold their instruments
in similar ways. Unlike in the Key of the Learned these
figures sit cross-legged and not on bended knees. Other
illustrations from the Wonders of Mechanics show figures
in a similar position.58 The artists repeatedly, albeit subtly,
evoke the draping fabric adorning figures from earlier
Arabic manuscripts, a feature not nearly as pronounced in
the line-drawings of a copy of al-Jazari made a few decades earlier.59 The shapes of figures’ faces differ, which
may be the result of the artist’s desire to evoke the
Mamluk elements of an earlier manuscript. Or, this
could simply be the result of the different mediums—
one being a more finished painting and the other being
diagrammatic.
If the artist’s instincts tended towards a Persian
style, the diagrams also suggest that he emulated an
earlier Mamluk manuscript. Pinning down the exact
Mamluk source is impossible here—whether it is as
early as 1315, or much later—but, many visual elements point to a fourteenth-century source. In general,
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the manuscript’s pages lack colored grounds and the
bare paper serves as the background for the diagrams.
This emphasis on the illustrations’ diagrammatic elements recalls the overall appearance of an earlier,
Mamluk model. Because there are no extant al-Jazari
scientific manuscripts in India prior to Mandu’s
Wonders of Mechanics and the only known Artuqid
copy is the earliest one of 1206, a fourteenth-century
Mamluk inspiration, if not an unknown Persian intermediary, would be the likeliest of all. One difficulty in
visualizing the similarities between a Mamluk
Compendium and Mandu’s Wonders of Mechanics is
the incongruent scales of these manuscripts as the latter
measures roughly half the size of the earlier models.
Other subtle details demonstrate how the artist, scholar, or scribe responsible for the Wonders of Mechanics
attempted to transcreate a Mamluk manuscript. Take the
concordant representations of the figures from a drinking
session in a manuscript made in 1315, probably in
Mamluk Syria (Figures 1 and 2).60 The mechanical elements of the diagrams, particularly those inside of the
dome, align well, although there is some variation in the
coded letter markings. One intriguing detail is how the
Mamluk artist has handled the pink robe with flows that
allude to draping.61 The drapes are formed with U-shaped
flares in a darker pink with fillings of a lighter tone. This
does not appear on the ochre and blue textiles of the
sultanate drinkers’ robes in the Mandu manuscript,
which seem to reference animal skins. Rather, similar
folds appear on another figure in the Wonders of
Mechanics, namely, one that functions as a drink dispenser (Figure 6).62 The folds here are black outlines highlighted with green following the contours of the curving
robe of the figure. These folds are not the same as the
bursts of the Mamluk figure’s textile, but their particularity to this reworking of an al-Jazari manuscript gives us
an idea of the Wonders of Mechanics’ earlier source. In
addition, similar flares of the figure’s headdress appear on
other figural images in the Wonders of Mechanics and
recall the headdresses of earlier Arab painting
(Figure 7).63 These flares also appear in earlier Qur’anic
ornament, notably, they occur in the borders of early
fifteenth-century Indian Qur’ans that are inspired by
exchange with fourteenth-century Iranian and Mamluk
manuscript cultures.64 It is also worth noting that the
corresponding illustration of the drinker in a fifteenthcentury manuscript made a few decades before
Shadiyabadi’s work lacks these folds and flares and
comes across plainly depicted.65 If the artist of Mandu’s
Wonders of Mechanics was looking at a later Iranian
manuscript instead of a Mamluk one, then perhaps they
too would have opted for a much plainer decorative
programme as in the copies made in 1485 and 1486.
All this evidence suggests that within the corpus of
the al-Jazari tradition, the Wonders of Mechanics exists
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V. Gupta
Figure 5. Main drawing of the boat (kushtī), Wonders of Mechanics of Shadiyabadi, Mandu, 1509, 23.2 × 15.7 cm, British Library
Or 13718, f. 104b. © British Library Board.
on the border between South Asia and the world of
Mamluk manuscripts. Where it adheres to al-Jazari’s
model, it implies Shadiyabadi’s deep understanding of
the original Arabic text. Where it departs from the alJazari tradition, it becomes adapted within the interregional world of the Hindustani sultanates and throws
light on the innovations occurring in the multilingual
local of Mandu itself.
A Translator’s Local Ambitions
Shadiyabadi’s translation negotiates frontiers between
India, the Persian cosmopolis, and the Islamicate
world. Travis Zadeh’s study of Abbasid period geographies elucidates how the act of translation (tarjumah)
both established and dissolved frontiers.66 In the
Wonders of Mechanics, the boundaries between the
larger Islamicate world and South Asia became more
porous. At the same time, bringing al-Jazari into a new
episteme—constituted both by language (Persian) and
place (South Asia)—further separated these two
worlds. While Persian language practices, behaviors,
and material cultures constituted a Persian cosmopolis,
I show here how the Persian of the Wonders of
Mechanics illustrates a concern for the local intellectual
culture of Mandu. The introduction of the text does not
name Shadiyabadi as the “translator” (tarjumān, mutarjim, nāqil) of al-Jazari. Rather, it uses sartorial metaphors common for characterising the process of
translation: “Nasir Shah ordered Shadiyabadi to outfit
the Kitāb al-Ḥiyal of the Banu Musa, which is a bride
covered in dazzling and fresh clothing, in the dress of
the fairies of Persian.”67
In a wider focus, one must bear in mind the strong
culture of translation in the Wonders of Mechanics’
world. The Persian translation movement of South
Asia sponsored in large part by the Islamicate courts
beginning in the twelfth century continued steadily for
several centuries. Scholars have emphasised the
South Asian Studies
Figure 6. Main drawing of figure Wonders of Mechanics of Shadiyabadi Mandu, 1509, British Library Or 13718, f. 116a.
© British Library Board.
215
216
V. Gupta
Figure 7. Semi-sectionalized drawing of figure, showing
mechanisms, Wonders of Mechanics of Shadiyabadi, Mandu,
1509, British Library Or 13718, f. 114a. © British Library
Board.
translation movement from Sanskrit and Indic knowledge systems into Persian and how Sanskrit writers
also adapted elements from their sultanate milieu.68
However, the many instances of translation from
Arabic and Turkic into Persian affirm that the
Hindustani sultanates were not only interested in
Indic knowledge. All knowledge preoccupied them.69
Like al-Jazari’s Compendium, al-Qazwini’s Wonders of
Creation in Arabic was also adapted into Persian, a few
decades later in 1547 Bijapur.70 The classics of
Islamicate sciences in Arabic thus were brought into
a Persian episteme of Hindustan.71 With regard to
sultanate material culture, Finbarr Barry Flood has
explored how objects such as ivories, metalwork and
coins, and architecture underwent processes of transcreation in South Asia from Islamicate or Indic models to Indo-Islamicate works.72 Whereas Flood uses the
term “translation” for the objects and monuments as
a metaphor, manuscript culture experienced both
a transcreation in material terms and a true translation
in the linguistic sense in Hindustan. It is thus not only
one single element—text or manuscript form—that
Shadiyabadi and Mandu’s book atelier translated from
one form to another. Rather, these manuscripts were
transcreated as wholes.
Although we may never know what Shadiyabadi’s
source manuscript(s) looked like, his translation is not
a standard, word-for-word Persian translation. Rather, it
shows a marked ambition for local comprehension. The
Wonders of Mechanics’ appendix of technical terms is the
work’s most obvious effort for vernacular didacticism.
Unlike the prefatory glossary of Shāhnāmah of 1438 attributed to the Deccan city of Bidar, the two-folio-long glossary of the Wonders of Mechanics contains Indic
vocabulary.73 Indic vocabulary does not appear as lemmas,
but as the synonyms that are equivalent to the Persian
glossary entry. For example, in his definition of the
sabādah, or whetstone, he writes, “and the people of
Hind call it a kahrasān.”74 Cross-referencing
Shadiyabadi’s own lexicon, the Key of the Learned defines
the whetstone, or fasān, with a Persian definition and the
phrase, “wheel of the whetstone that in Hindavi is called
the kahrasān/charkh-i sabādah kih hindavī kahrsan
gūyand.”75 The Indic vernacular word kahrasān here
entered a sultanate context.76 That it appears in both
Shadiyabadi’s Key of the Learned and Wonders of
Mechanics suggests its ubiquity to his personal lexicon. It
was a vernacular word in two senses—first, it was Hindavi,
and second, it was a word associated with everyday life.
Only a few years after he wrote these works the sultan of
Malwa started issuing public decrees in Hindavi.77
Let us dwell on one popular vernacular term found
in the Wonders of Mechanics that prompts further visual
and philological analysis.78 One of architectural significance is the word for a protruding or slanting eave
known as the chajja. Chajjas are popular in sultanate
architecture and their brackets are often where
Islamicate building types (mosque, tomb) commonly
adapt from Indic ornament.79 In his chapter on the
elephant water clock, al-Jazari takes pains to detail
every component of this device. The elephant’s carriage
has a balcony upon it, which Shadiyabadi translates into
Persian as such, “Chapter 12, On the Functioning of the
Balcony . . . that Indians call the chajah, and a man sits
upon it./faṣl-i davāzdiham dar bayān-i kayfiyyat-i ‘amal-i
rawshan . . . kih ānrā ahl-i hind chajah gūyand va mardī
bar ān rawshan nashistih bāshad.”80 Here, and at least
once more, Shadiyabadi equates the term rawshan (balcony) with chajja.81 The Wonders of Mechanics’ illustration of the balcony depicts a figure facing forward,
seated upon a throne framed by red and yellow cusped
arches topped by a dome (Figure 8).82 Below him
a network of curved lines and arches form ornamental
brackets that support the balcony. The corresponding
diagram from a Mamluk Compendium dated 1354 displays a simply delineated red frame that may be unfinished (Figure 9).83 Within the frame a figure wearing
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217
Figure 8. Figure on balcony, and semicircle of roundels Wonders of Mechanics of Shadiyabadi, Mandu, 1509, Folio:
23.2 × 15.7 cm, British Library Or 13718, f. 60b. © British Library Board.
218
V. Gupta
Figure 9. Figure on balcony, and semicircle of roundels, Compendium of Theory and Useful Practice for the Fabrication of
Machines of al-Jazari, Mamluk, 1354, Folio: 40 x 27.7 cm.
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a stylised red robe sits beneath a dome. Considering the
simplicity of this architectural frame, the only notable
features are the two support brackets formed of concave
and convex cusps. The visual focus on these brackets
highlights how the rawshan or chajah protrudes from
a building.
Given its ubiquity in architecture and occurrence
in the Wonders of Mechanics a fuller philology of
chajja is in order. A. Y. Hassan defines rawshan as
a balcony in his glossary of technical terms in alJazari’s Compendium.84 Although it appears in alJazari’s Arabic text, the word rawshan carries
a Persian etymology and can also mean “window”
or more commonly “light.”85 It marks one of the
many Persian words that the “local cosmopolitan” alJazari calques into Arabic. Likewise, chajja in common Hindi parlance means “balcony” as well. It originates from the Sanskrit word chādya that means
“eave” and is a feature of western Indian temple
architecture from the end of the tenth century and
into the eleventh century.86 Chādya is related to the
root chad that means to cover over something.87
A Classical Hindi dictionary of the vernaculars of
Avadhi and Brajbhasha contains the lemma chajjā
with the definition, “the part of the roof’s wall that
protrudes,” suggesting that the word was possibly
used in early modern Hindavi.88 Scholars of sultanate
and Mughal architecture have also taken note of the
chajja attesting to its ubiquity for these buildings.89
Ebba Koch, for instance, provides the definition of
chhajjā as a “sloping or horizontal projection from the
top of a wall supported by brackets to protect from
rain or sun.”90 If Koch bases this definition on
Mughal Persian sources, as she states, this would
continue the term’s genealogy from the sultanate
Wonders of Mechanics, further underscoring continuity in the artificial rupture of the Mughals.
That Shadiyabadi clarifies the Persian word rawshan with chajja relates to his aspirations for his text
to be understood locally. Surely, the built environment
Shadiyabadi inhabited was full of chajjas that displayed
Indic ornament. The tomb of Sultan Hushang in Mandu
finished around 1439 has a wide chajja with curving
brackets (Figure 10).91 The brackets show lotus designs
and geometric ornament common to temple architecture of late medieval Western India.
Based on these examples, traces of the vernacular
in the Wonders of Mechanics convey the widespread
use of Indic vocabulary for sultanate material culture
and Shadiyabadi’s local sensibilities.92 His use of such
vernacular words may have anticipated an immediate
interregional circulation of his work for Persian readers
within South Asia, and eventually beyond. And yet, his
219
Persian translation did not need to be of a Sanskrit epic
such as the Rāmāyaṇa for it to contain hints of the local
context. The few Indic terms in his glossary further
substantiate this claim. His ambitions are Persianate
insofar as he translates al-Jazari’s Compendium into
Persian, but vernacular elements—in both text and
image—of the Wonders of Mechanics make it inextricable from its Hindustani context. For an author whose
oeuvre contains a poetic commentary on Khaqani,
a multilingual Persian lexicon, and this Persian translation of al-Jazari’s Compendium, these few vernacular
elements demonstrate Shadiyabadi’s attention to his
immediate region. Here, the process of transcreation
inflects the kind of text Shadiyabadi brings into Persian
from Arabic. Shadiyabadi transcreates al-Jazari’s
Compendium by making it more legible to audiences
who know Persian but would likely appreciate some
Indic equivalents. He reaches a cosmopolitan world
literate in Persian, but also the local, interregional
patchwork of the Hindustani sultanates.
Transregional Exchanges between Malwa and the
Mamluk World
While the Wonders of Mechanics was made in India,
let us now zoom out to the wider Indian Ocean and
Red Sea networks that likely enabled this translation
to occur. Shadiyabadi clearly encountered an earlier
manuscript of al-Jazari’s Compendium. And though
we do not know which manuscript(s) this was,
some evidence suggests a Mamluk path of exchange.
Scholars have previously perceived Mamluk characteristics of sultanate manuscripts, but these arguments are primarily supported by stylistic
similarities between scripts, ornament, and figural
representations.93 In absence of documentary evidence that elucidates the circumstances of
Shadiyabadi’s education or access to manuscripts,
I propose some pathways of intellectual exchange
and the evidence of gifting between Mandu and
Cairo. This evidence allows us to further conjecture
the Wonders of Mechanics’ Mamluk source.
In several ways, the Wonders of Mechanics attests to
a scholastic exchange that may have occurred through
the institution of the madrasah or religious school.
Mandu’s Madrasah-i Bām-i Bihisht, or the School of
the Heavenly Vault, anchored Malwa’s intellectual life.
Active around the time the Wonders of Mechanics’
composition, it contributed to a network of
madrasahs including the madrasah of Maḥmūd Gavān
(completed 1472) to its south in Bidar, and the madrasah of Chanderi (dated around 1425) to its north.
220
V. Gupta
Figure 10. Tomb of Sultan Hushang, Mandu, with marble chajja and brackets, Completed ca. 1439, Photograph: Vivek Gupta,
August 2015.
Madrasahs, however, were not the sole sites of learning
in the fifteenth century. Sufi lodges and informal milieus disseminated and produced knowledge as well.
Madrasahs, though, by their design serve as an index
of knowledge consumption and production. The architecture of the Nāṣiriyyah Madrasah in Cairo completed
in 1303 enables Elias Muhanna to evaluate distinct
intellectual strands flourishing in Mamluk Egypt.94
Muhanna also draws attention to the rise in the patronage of hundreds of madrasahs in Egypt and Syria during the fifteenth century, a phenomenon which may
have inspired the sponsorship of similar institutions in
places such as Mandu, Bidar, and Chanderi.
Not only did the Indian sultanates have madrasahs in
Hindustan, but they patronized them in Mecca as well.
Meccan historians report that these madrasahs were built
in coordination with the Mamluks.95 These building projects marked the sultanates’ efforts to participate in
a transregional Islamicate world in which the Mamluks
played a central role. Of the 23 known madrasahs founded
in medieval Mecca, the madrasahs of Bengal (date constructed 1410–11), Gulbarga (1427–28), and Cambay
(1461–62) are some of the earliest Indian examples.96
A letter sent from Sultan Mahmud Shah Khalji of Mandu
(r. 1436–69) in early 1467 reports that he had sent an
emissary on behalf of the Malwa sultanate to initiate two
madrasahs.97 These madrasahs were called Bayt Umm
Hāni’ (House of Umm Hāni’) and Dār al-Malā‘ibah
(House of al-Malā‘ibah). These structures were situated
to the south of the Ḥaram mosque, which was a desirable
location for a religious institution of the period. We know
that the Mamluks kept a watchful eye on the activities and
of these madrasahs, because Malwa’s madrasahs were
seized and destroyed by an exploitative Mamluk representative in 1462 for an unknown reason.98 The Abbasid
caliph al-Mustanjid of Cairo also cites Mandu’s
madrasahs in Mecca in his letter to Mahmud Shah Khalji
dated 5 April 1465, after they were demolished.99
There is also reason to believe that the curricula of
these Indian madrasahs in Mecca were not restricted to
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religious instruction. The Gulbargiyya Madrasah associated with the Bahmani Sultanate of Gulbarga and
Bidar (1347–1527) accepted students regardless of
their affiliation with a particular school of Islamic
law.100 In this case, we can imagine al-Jazari’s
Compendium listed on some madrasah syllabi. One of
Shadiyabadi’s professors who saw value in the knowledge of automata may have brought back a Mamluk alJazari manuscript from Mandu’s outpost in Mecca.
Long-distance contacts with Yemen could have also
served as a channel through which Shadiyabadi accessed
a Mamluk manuscript of al-Jazari’s Compendium. During
the late thirteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries, the nearest
port to Mandu, the city of Cambay, had mercantile ties
with Yemen. It operated a robust export market of marble
stone carving, evidence of which survives in Yemeni
centres of Juban and Aden.101 Ornamental decoration
from the Manṣūriyyah Madrasah built by al-Malik alMansur (r. 1478–89) in Juban offers close comparisons
to those on Mandu’s monuments.102 Furthermore, roughly
50 kilometres away from Juban lies the Yemeni city of
Rada‘, where the grand ‘Āmiriyyah Madrasah stands.
Scholars have drawn parallels between the architecture
of the ‘Āmiriyyah built in 1504 and Mandu’s fifteenthcentury monuments. The Congregational Mosque (1454)
and the School of the Heavenly Vault (early fifteenth
century) of Mandu bear close resemblances to the
‘Āmiriyyah in their portal and horseshoe-shaped archway
respectively.103 The roof pavilion or chatrī crowning the
‘Āmiriyyah is a common Indian structure that also
appears on Mandu’s Mosque of Mālik Mughīs (1452).104
We may thus envision an adventurous Shadiyabadi
entangled within this network between India and
Yemen. He could have journeyed to Yemen to study
at the Manṣūriyyah madrasah or travellers may have
carried manuscripts on their voyage crossing the Indian
Ocean. Yet, the direction of artistic exchange from
India to Yemen remains to be seen. It is also not certain
if the source of the sultanate features on Yemeni
madrasahs was in fact Mandu. Gujarat could be
a likely source given the similarities between dyed
cotton textiles from that region and the wall decorations in the ‘Āmiriyyah.105 The cities of Gulbarga and
Bidar of the Bahmani sultanate would also make likely
candidate especially because of the similar kinds of
wall painting at these sites.106 The problem of identifying a sultanate source with precision is significant,
suggesting that courts were indeed “networks of people” in this period.
Aside from madrasah networks, the historical
record contains an extraordinary report of objects
arriving in Hindustan from Mamluk Egypt. The
Abbasid caliph of Cairo, al-Mustanjid (1455–79),
sent a number of gifts including holy books, a ring,
221
a sword, robes of honour, a flag, and a letter to
Mahmud Shah Khalji at the beginning of year
1466.107 This report is contained in a section of the
Traditions of Mahmud Shah entitled, “A Chapter on the
Arrival of Messengers from the Abode of Perpetuity,
Cairo, and the gifts from Commander of the Faithful/
guftār dar zikr-i āmadan-i rasūlān az dār al-khuld
miṣr va tuḥaf az hażrat amīr al-mu’minīn.”108 This
gift exchange occurred towards the end of Mahmud
Shah’s reign in January 1465 (870 A.H.).109 The
Traditions of Mahmud Shah praises these gifts profusely: “the first gift was like the quarry of jewels
before mankind and the source of the elixir of life
of the worlds, namely this gift was a Qur’an and
blessed books [muṣḥaf-i mujīd va furqān-i ḥamīd].
The sight of [it, i.e. this gift] was like the sights of
the brilliant of the most brilliant.”110 “Second, a ring
that was the seal of Solomon set with his stone and
the stone of the golden sun; this was the ring of the
good hand.”111 “Third, a sword whose sharpness
blunts the sword of the sun, and in the name of the
horizon the sun’s sword is concealed.”112 This list of
three gifts including two robes of honour (khila‘tayn
sharīfayn) is corroborated with the contents of the
caliph’s letter fully quoted in Arabic in the Traditions
of Mahmud Shah.113 Through their gifts, the Abbasid
caliphs endowed Mahmud Shah with spiritual power.
Apparently, these royal gifts and letter from Egypt
enamoured Mahmud Shah so much that he dreamt
he wore one of the robes of honour, mounted
a horse in procession, and appeared before the eighthcentury early Abbasid caliphs al-Mansur and Harun
al-Rashid.114 The fact that these gifts penetrated the
psychology of Mahmud Shah signifies the importance
of having the prestige of the broader Islamicate world
for the ruler of Mandu, an attitude that perhaps motivated the Wonders of Mechanics’ commission.
The fragments of evidence of Mandu and Mamluk
relations allows us to imagine al-Jazari’s Compendium
changing hands between scholars behind the scenes of
transregional diplomatic affairs. The Egyptian embassy’s
gift of a Qur’an and holy books does not mean they
presented a copy of al-Jazari’s Compendium to the court
of Mandu. Here, the most direct implication is for fifteenth-century Indian Qur’ans.115 Mandu’s initiation of
madrasahs in Mecca and Mahmud Shah’s dream cast
a portrait of Malwa as an ambitious sultanate. Because
of these transregional aims the later ruler Nasir Shah
Khalji commanded Shadiyabadi to translate the Kitāb
al-Ḥiyal, which implies Shadiyabadi’s access to an original Arabic text.
Nevertheless, I do not want to overstate the case of
Malwa-Mamluk exchange, because a Persian intermediary may have facilitated Shadiyabadi’s access to the
222
V. Gupta
Compendium. The large numbers of Iranian émigré intellectuals to Hindustan during this period certainly animated Mandu’s republic of letters.116 At the neighboring
court of Bidar, the governor Mahmud Gavan forged epistolary friendships with the Timurid-Sufi poet Jami as well
as the Mamluks in a distinctive idiom of Arabicised
Persian.117 After all, Shadiyabadi was a commentator on
Persian poets and the Wonders of Mechanics is in Persian
with illustrations showing regional Persian elements.
Conclusion: Transregional, Translation,
Transcreation
This study has shown how the transcreation of an
Islamicate manuscript at the turn of the sixteenth century
in South Asia both connected and distanced locales
between Cairo and Mandu. Shadiyabadi’s intellectual horizons were both immediate and distant. Through
a glossary and vernacular clarifications, he sought to
make al-Jazari legible to his immediate region of
Malwa, and quite likely to the world of other neighboring
sultanates. In translating al-Jazari’s instructions on how to
make certain devices in first-person, he localized alJazari for his audiences. Processes of both vast geographical reach and intensive localisation, palpable in the
connected book history approach to the Wonders of
Mechanics, were important elements of intellectual culture of scholars writing in fifteenth-century Hindustan.
Many constellations emerge through this study of
Shadiyabadi’s translation of al-Jazari in Mandu. These
networks are as far-reaching as Egypt, Mecca, Cairo,
and Yemen, and are as close to home as the Deccan.
Such attempts to nativize knowledge of automata in
Jazira and South Asia mirror cases in the medieval
Latin West as studied by Elly Truitt, and in early
modern Northern Europe as analysed by Angela
Vanhaelen.118 Yet, every point of connection also
came with disconnection; the distancing from
a source through reinterpretation, translation, transcreation, and vernacularisation. Here, one cannot
help but return to the fact that Shadiyabadi, a scholar
whose very name linked him to Shadiyabad or Mandu,
was not the first to localise transregional knowledge of
automata in Malwa—king Bhoja of Dhar had undertaken a similar task centuries earlier. Likely unbeknownst to him, Shadiyabadi continued this tradition
by translating wondrous robots for his community.
and the participants of the Translating Science symposium
hosted by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscripts Studies,
also at Penn, where I presented parts of this research in
November 2022. All errors are my own.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Daud Ali and Ayesha Sheth for inviting me
to contribute to this volume and to the workshop Courts of
North India & The Deccan (c. 1347–1562) at the University of
Pennsylvania. I am also grateful to Elly Truitt, Lynn Ransom,
Daud Ali, “Bhoja’s Mechanical Garden:
Translating Wonder Across the Indian Ocean,
circa 800—1100 CE.” History of Religions 55
no. 4 (2016): 464-465.
Upendra Nath Day Day, Medieval Malwa:
a Political and Cultural History 1401-1562 (New
Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1965), p. 23. See
also Michael Willis, “Dhār, Bhoja and Sarasvatī:
from Indology to Political Mythology and Back”,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22, 1 (2012):
135-36.
Ali, “Bhoja’s Mechanical Garden.”
Regarding the title of al-Jazari’s see George Saliba,
“The Function of Mechanical Devices in Medieval
Islamic Society,” Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences (1985): 142. I follow recent work by
Lamia Balafrej situating al-Jazari’s work in scholarship on slavery, which has used the titling “A
Compendium on the Theory and Useful Practice
for the Fabrication of Machines.” See Lamia
Balafrej, “Automated Slaves, Ambivalent Images
and Noneffective Machines in al-Jazari’s
Compendium of Mechanical Arts, 1206,” 21:
Inquiries into Art History and the Visual 4 (2022):
737-774. See also Meekyung MacMurdie, “The
Manuscript Machine: Assemblages and Divisions
in Jazari’s Compendium,” in Destroyed—
Disappeared—Lost—Never Were, ed. Beate
Fricke and Aden Kumler, (University Park: Penn
State University Press, 2022) 113-128, for a recent
study of al-Jazari’s Compendium.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories:
Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early
Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31
no. 3 (Jul. 1997): 735-762.
Rosalind O’Hanlon, “The Early Modern in
South Asia,” Journal of Early Modern History
27 (2023): 159.
See Yael Rice, “The Global Aspirations of the
Mughal Album,” in Rembrandt and the
Inspiration of India, ed. Stephanie Schrader,
(Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2018) 61-77.
Elizabeth Lambourn, “Material Cultures of
Writing in the Indian Ocean World: A palmleaf letter at the Mamluk Court,” in The
Archaeology of Knowledge Traditions of the
Indian Ocean World, ed. Himanshu Prabha
Ray (London: Routledge, 2021) 146–68.
South Asian Studies
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Chistopher Bahl, Histories of Circulation:
Sharing Arabic Manuscripts across the Western
Indian Ocean, 1400—1700 (PhD thesis, SOAS,
University of London, 2018).
Vivek Gupta, “Images for Instruction:
A Multilingual Illustrated Dictionary in
Fifteenth-Century Sultanate India,” Muqarnas:
An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the
Islamic World 38 (2021): 77–112.
See my discussion of rawshan later in this
article.
For a study that demonstrates “transcreation” as
a concept within manuscript studies, see Vivek
Gupta, “How Persianate Is It? A World-Making
Book Transcreated from Iraq to India,” Persian
Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the
Afro-Eurasian World, ed. Matthew P. Canepa
(Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2024) 238-56.
An important study of this period is Francesca
Orsini and Samira Sheikh, eds. After Timur Left:
culture and circulation in fifteenth-century North
India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Jeremiah P. Losty, The Art of the Book in India,
London: British Library, 1982, p. 68. See the
unpublished notes of Muhammad Isa Waley.
BL Or 13718, f. 188b.
Éloïse Brac de la Perrière was the first to speculate the Mamluk features of this manuscript.
See Brac de la Perrière, “Du Caire à Mandu: La
Transmission des Modèles dans l’Inde des
Sultanats,” in Ecrits et culture en Asie centrale
et dans le monde turco-iranien, Xe-XIXe siècles,
eds. Francis Richard and Maria Szuppe, (Paris:
Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2008) 354.
The first manuscript is of Mughal provenance
and is CBL In 24. Linda Leach dates this manuscript to the 1590s based on its illustrations, but
this has yet to be closely studied. See Mughal
and other Indian paintings from the Chester
Beatty Library, vol. 2, 534. The second manuscript is Lot 146 of Sale 1557 at Christie’s
(9 October 2014), attributed to the Northern
Deccan, 1600. The manuscript is fragmentary
and survives in 72 folios. The third is Occult
Sciences Persian MS 301 in the Telangana
Oriental Manuscripts Library and Research
Institute, Hyderabad, which I tentatively attribute to Mughal India at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Its opening folios and
final folios may belong to another manuscript
as they do not match BL Or 13718’s text. The
colophon page gives the name of the author
Mullā Shāh Fatḥullāh Shīrāzī, an intellectual at
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
223
Akbar’s court, and date 9 July 1585. The fourth
manuscript is Misc. Persian MS 219 also located
in the Telangana Oriental Manuscripts Library
and Research Institute, Hyderabad. This book is
incomplete and undated and it is incorrectly
titled Ṣinā‘at-i Ablnīvas (Apollonius). The fifth
manuscript is MS 708 in the Shahīd Muṭharī
Sipāhsālār Library, Tehran, entitled Jar alathqāl. I thank Daina Buseckaite for drawing
my attention to this manuscript. MS 707 of the
same collection bears the same title, but its text
does not corroborate with Shadiyabadi’s. The Jar
al-athqāl is a work on engineering, clocks, and
mechanics, and shares many similarities with
the Wonders of Mechanics. The Rampur Raza
Library holds two manuscripts by this title, RRL
A.3689 and A.3691.
Losty, The Art of the Book in India, 68; Brac de
la Perrière, L’art du livre dans l’Inde des sultanats, 71; Ibid, “Du Caire à Mandu,” 354; and
Yves Porter, Z. Vesel and S. Tourkin, eds.,
Images of Islamic Science: Illustrated manuscripts from the Iranian World (Tehran: IFRI,
2009), 62.
Donald Hill, The Book of Knowledge of
Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Kitāb fī ma‘rifat
al-ḥiyal al-handasiyya) by Ibn al-Razzāz alJazarī (Dordrecth: D. Reidel Publishing
Company, 1974), 5; al-Jazarī, Al-Jāmi‘ bayn
al-‘ilm w’al-‘amal al-nāfi‘ fī ṣinā‘at al-ḥiyal, 1516.
Hill, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious
Mechanical Devices, 9; Saliba, “The Function
of Mechanical Devices in Medieval Islamic
Society,” 143.
Finbarr Barry Flood, The Great Mosque of
Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an
Umayyad Visual Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2001),
115–16; See also, Elly Truitt, Medieval Robots:
Mechanism,
Magic,
Nature,
and
Art
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2015).
Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus, 119.
See Persis Berlekamp, “Symmetry, Sympathy,
and Sensation: Talismanic Efficacy and Slippery
Iconographies in Early Thirteenth-Century Iraq,
Syria, and Anatolia,” Representations 133
(2016): 91, for an illustration of the doorknockers
in the first al-Jazari manuscript juxtaposed with
contemporaneous physical evidence from the
Jazira (Mesopotamia).
Süleymaniye Fatih 4147, ff. 187-197. Karin
Rührdanz, “Zakariyyā al-Qazwīnī on the
Inhabitants of the Supralunar World: From the
224
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
V. Gupta
First Persian Version (659/1260-61) to the
Second Arabic Redaction (678/1279- 80),” in
The Intermediate Worlds of Angels: Islamic
Representations of Celestial Beings in
Transcultural Contexts, eds. Sara Kuehn, Stefan
Leder, and Hans-Peter Pokel (Beirut, 2019),
384–402, and Hannah Hyden, The Ethics of
Wonder: The Persian Qazvini Corpus (1300—
1632) PhD dissertation (Harvard University,
forthcoming).
See Anna Caiozzo, “Entre prouesse technique,
cosmologie et magie. L’automate dans l’imaginaire de l’Orient medieval,” in La fabrique du
corps humain. La machine modèle du vivant, ed.
Véronique Adam and Anna Caiozzo (Grenoble,
2010) 43–79.
See Vivek Gupta “Remapping the World in
a Fifteenth-Century Cosmography: Genres and
Networks between Deccan India and Iran,”
Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian
Studies 59/2 (2021): 151–168. For a discussion
of how the artists of Mandu’s Bustan (terminus
ante quem, 1502-3) may have been indebted to
the Cairo Bustan made a few years earlier in
Timurid Herat, see Lamia Balafrej, The Making
of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2019) 222–225.
Topkapı Ahmet III, No. 3472 is the Artuqid
copy.
Fuat Sezgin, ed., Al-Jāmi‘ bayn al-‘ilm w’al-‘amal
al-nāfi‘ fī ṣinā‘at al-ḥiyal (Frankfurt: Institute for
the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, 2002), vi.
It is preserved in the Topkapı Ahmet III,
No. 3472. For an analysis see Rachel Ward,
“Evidence for a School of Painting at the
Artuqid Court,” in The Art of Syria and the
Jazira, 1100—1250, Oxford Studies in Islamic
Art 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985),
69-83. The early studies of this manuscript include
Kurt
Holter,
“Die
islamische
Miniaturhandschriften vor 1350,” Zentralblatt
für Bibliothekswesen 54, no. 2 (1937a): 6, and
“Die Galen-Handschrift und die Makamen der
Hariri der Wiener Nationalbibliothek,” Jahrbuch
der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien XI
(1937b): 37, that show twelve of its folios are
later additions. J.M. Rogers, The Topkapı Sarayı
Museum—The
Albums
and
Illustrated
Manuscripts, trans. and ed. J.M. Rogers (London:
Thames and Hudson), 30-31, accurately dates the
manuscript to 1206.
These include MS Topkapı Sarayı, Collection
Hazine 414 (dated thirteenth century?);
a dispersed manuscript dated 1315 with folios
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
in American collections; CBL Arab 4187 (fourteenth century); MS Aya Sofia 3606 (dated
1354); and, Topkapı Sarayı Collection Ahmet
III, No. 3350 (dated 1459). Hassan’s introduction to his critical edition of the Compendium,
12-14, and Sezgin’s facsimile of MS Aya Sofia
3606, v-vi are most instructive for reconstructing this manuscript history.
BL Or 13718, f. 3a. The introduction also contains the statement where Nāṣir Shāh commands
Shadiyabadi to translate the Kitāb al-Ḥiyal of
the Bānū Mūsā into Persian. “farmān shud kih
kitāb-i ḥiyal-i banī mūsā kih ‘arūsī-yi maḥrūs
bilibās-i istabraq tāzī-yi malbūs ast, agar ūrā
bikiswat-i parīnān-i bārsī muktafī kardānī.”
Jean Aubin, “Indo-Islamica I La Vie et L’oeuvre de
Nīmdihī,” Revue des études islamiques 34 (1966):
71, who cites the manuscript of the Kanz al-mā‘ānī
of ‘Abd al-Karīm Nīmdihī, Istanbul ms. Esad
Efendi no. 884, ff. 194a-196b. I thank Emma Flatt
for providing me with this reference. See Flatt, The
Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the
Persian Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019) 85.
Hill, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious
Mechanical Devices. The Bodleian manuscript
is MS Greaves 27.
These include CBL In 24 (1585-90), QNL HC.
MS.02290 (Deccan, ca. 1600), Christie’s Lot 147
(Northern Deccan, 1600), Bodleian MS Fraser
186 (dated 1638), Rampur Raza Library MS
III.34 (18th century), and NYPL Spencer IndoPers 02 (copied 1621, illustrated in the 19th century). BL Add MS 23391 relates to NYPL
Spencer Indo-Pers 02 but was likely made in
Iran. Bodleian MS Fraser 186 factors prominently
into Hill’s study, and Barbara Schmitz recorded
the latter two manuscripts in Islamic Manuscripts
in the New York Public Library, 165-66; and, Ibid,
Mughal and Persian Painting, 79.
BnF MS Arabe 2477, f. 112a. tamma al-kitāb
wa’l-ḥamdu li’l-malik al-wahāb waqt ghurūb yawm aljuma ‘sāb‘rabī‘al-ākhir sanna tisa‘īn wa thamānīmā’a
li-l-hijrah. wa wajadtu ‘alā’l-nuskhah alatī naqaltu
minhā mā ṣawwartuhi nujaz hādhā’l-kitāb yawm aljuma‘rāb‘ṣafar sanna 742 li’l-hijrah. wa kānna
maktūban ‘alā’l-nuskhah alatī naqaltu minhā
hādhahi al-nuskhah mā mithāluhi wa hādhahi alnuskhah manqūlahi min nuskhah naqaltu min khaṭṭ
al-mawlif wa ammā al-ḥurūf wa’l-ibdāl wa rasūm
ṣūrat al-ashkāl fa-mimmā rasmahi bi-ḍabṭ wa rasmahi bi-khaṭṭahi raḥmat allāhu ta‘ālā. al-farrāgh
min nuskhahā rāb‘jumādā al-ākhira sannah ithnayn
wa sittamā’ah.
South Asian Studies
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
These are CBL Arab 4187 (fourteenth century)
and MS Aya Sofia 3606 (dated 1354). The
codex of CBL Arab 4187 is currently not accessible and therefore its colophon cannot be verified. A survey of all extant copies shows that
there were two copies made some time in the
fourteenth century and 1354 respectively. This
makes the existence of a 1341 copy very
probable.
BnF Arabe 2477, f. 112a. This exact formula of
“letters, variants, and drawings of the devices,”
appears in several manuscripts. Notably, it appears
in the dispersed manuscript dated 1315, and the
colophon of Bodleian MS Greaves 27, f. 113b. For
the former, see Duncan Haldane, Mamluk
Painting (Warminster: Aris & Phillips Ltd,
1978), 36, and for the latter see Hill, The Book of
Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 206.
BnF Arabe 2477, f. 26a.
Ibid, f. 8b.
NYPL Spencer Indo-Pers 02.
NYPL Spencer Indo-Pers 02, f. 23a (copy);
f. 34a (drawing).
BnF Suppl. Persan 1145 and 1145a.
Ibid, f. 3a.
CBL In 24, f. 1b, lines 1-8 would be the original
text that should appear on BL Or 13718, f. 2a.
The opening words of BL Or 3299, f. 2b and
CBL In 24, f. 1b both read, “ḥamd-i mutavāfir va
sanā’-i mutakāsir.”
BL Or 13718, f. 188b.
Hill, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious
Mechanical Devices, 17; al-Jazarī, Al-Jāmi‘ bayn
al-‘ilm w’al-‘amal al-nāfi‘ fī ṣinā‘at al-ḥiyal, 11.
BL Or 13718, f. 5a.
The elided section concerns the cast brass door
made for a king’s palace. This section may have
been on folios that were possibly removed during the process of rebinding the manuscript. See
Hill, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious
Mechanical Devices, 191-5. The extra devices
are found on BL Or 13718, f. 189a-b. The first
is clearly labeled as ṭasht or basin. The second
device’s illustration appears as a swirling wheel.
Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates, 85.
BL Or 13718, f. 7a.
There are two cases where there is space left for
an illustration that does not appear. The first is
on f. 32a where the illustration would show one
of the six bows (i.e. bracing rods) for holding
spheres together, although a crude drawing has
been added in the margins. The second appears
on f. 109a where the diagram would have been
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
225
of the matrix of entry holes into the valve
(buzāl).
This differs from CBL In 24, the 1585-90,
Mughal Wonders of Mechanics, that contains
illumination in several of its diagrams.
Representative diagrams where figures or animals are omitted appear on ff. 41b, 44a, 64a,
67a, 79b, 83b, 85b, 88a, 89a, 91b, 98b, 105b,
138b, 144a, 147b, 150b, and 173a of BL Or
13718. BnF Arabe 2477 exemplifies the phenomenon of adding the figures last in the drawing process.
Hill, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious
Mechanical Devices, 27. In Arabic, this corresponds to “wa’l-bawāq la ḥājjah illā ṣūratahi idh
laysa lahu ḥarakah wa ṣawt al-būq yakhraj min
juhat ukhrā.” See al-Jazarī, Al-Jāmi‘ bayn al‘ilm w’al-‘amal al-nāfi‘ fī ṣinā‘at al-ḥiyal, 37. In
Persian Shadiyabadi writes, “va yik shakhṣ az
jumlah-i ṣūrat-hā dar īnjā namūdah shud bas
fahm kun ẓāhir-rā va bā taṣvīr-i bāqī-yi
ālāt-i ḥājjat nīst az ānkih ānrā ḥarakat va āvāz
nīst. [f. 17a] va āvāz-i būq az duvvam ṭarf-i ū
bīrūn ayad va ṣurat īnast,” See BL Or 13718,
f. 17a-b.
BL Or 3299, f. 98.
CBL In 02, f. 36b, the Nujūm al-‘Ulūm (Bijapur,
1570), isolates this turban decoration as a motif
and defines it as sunbalah, or ear of corn.
BL Or 13718, f. 104b.
A closer match of a figure on bended knee
appears in the Wonders of Mechanics’ depiction
of figures in a drinking session. See, Ibid,
f. 120b.
Bodleian MS Greaves 27 dated 1486.
MS Aya Sofia 3606, f. 345a and BL Or 13718,
f. 120b.
This kind of draping on robes derives a long
genealogy in Islamicate arts of the book. Many
examples can be found in thirteenth-century
Arab painting.
BL Or 13718, f. 116a.
Ibid, 114a. For another early example see the
pupil’s headdress in a depiction of Aristotle and
his pupil in the thirteenth-century Kitāb na‘t alḥayawān, BL Or 2784, f. 94a.
See the medallion on BnF Arabe 2324, f. 137a,
made in 1307-10, Tabriz, that has these flares.
They also appear on the far outer borders of the
Qur’an, Keir Collection VII.42, attributed to the
end of the fourteenth century. For this second
example, see Brac de la Perrière, “Manuscripts
in Bihari Calligraphy,” 68, fig. 4.
226
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
V. Gupta
Bodleian MS Greaves 27, f. 67b. They also do
not appear on fourteenth-century concordant
illustrations, but these figures do have highly
intricate textile garments. See the figure in
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 31.125, from the
dispersed manuscript dated 1315. Here, the
automaton wears a luminous flower-patterned
green and gold textile robe. Also, it has been
previously argued that the Mughal Wonders of
Mechanics clearly derived from Mamluk model,
however the absence of folds such as these seem
to indicate that it took its cue through an intermediary manuscript such as the original Mandu
manuscript under discussion (cf. CBL In 24,
f. 48b). Linda Leach makes this claim about
a Mamluk model in her catalogue of the
Chester Beatty Library’s Indian manuscripts.
See Leach, Mughal and other Indian paintings
from the Chester Beatty Library, vol. 2, 534.
See Travis Zadeh, Mapping Frontiers across
medieval Islam: Geography, Translation, and
the ‘Abbāsid Empire (London: I.B. Tauris,
2011), 1-12. For the Persian cosmopolis, see
Emma Flatt.
BL Or 13718, f. 3a. “farmān shud kih
kitāb-i ḥiyal-i banī mūsā kih ‘arūsī-yi maḥrūs bilibās-i istabraq tāzī-yi malbūs ast agar ū-rā bikiswat-i parīnān-i bārsī muktafī kardānī.” For
a discussion of sartorial metaphors used for
translation, see Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of
Translation: material culture and medieval
Hindu-Muslim encounter (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 61-88, and Vivek
Gupta, “Arabic in Hindustan: Comparative
Poetics in the Eighteenth Century and Azad
Bilgrami’s The Coral Rosary,” Journal of South
Asian Intellectual History 4/2 (2021): 192-93.
Emblematic of this is Audrey Truschke, Culture
of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
Obrock, “Muslim Mahākāvyas,” identifies ways
in which sultanate Sanskrit texts respond to
Persianate culture.
A good example of Turkic or Chaghtai translation into Persian is the Bāburnāmah. This totalizing tendency is well represented by the
Nujūm al-‘Ulūm (Stars of the Sciences), CBL
In 02.
Rieu, Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the
British Museum, vol. 2, 464.
Here, it is worth recalling an earlier instance of the
widespread translation of scientific texts, namely
the early emergence of the Arabic illustrated manuscript in the tenth century that occurred through
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
several adaptations of Byzantine culture and translations from Greek works on the cosmos and
sciences. See Eva Hoffman, “The Beginnings of
the Illustrated Book: An Intersection Between Art
and Scholarship,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 37-52.
Flood, Objects of Translation.
For the Shahnamah’s glossary see Peyvand
Firouzeh, “Convention and Reinvention: The
British Library Shahnamah of 1438 (Or.
1403),” Iran: Journal of the British Institute of
Persian Studies 57 (2019): 12. The Wonders of
Mechanics’ glossary appears on BL Or 13718, ff.
189b-190b.
Ibid, f. 190a.
BL Or 3299, f. 214b. The related definition of
mortar, or javāz, is included in the Key of the
Learned and illustrated. See, Ibid, f. 89a.
R. S. McGregor defines the word kharasān as
a whetstone with a Brajbhasha etymology. See
McGregor, ed., The Oxford Hindi-English
Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994) 230.
Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age (New
Delhi: Allen Lane, 2019) 135.
Future research will unlock the significance of the
other vernacular words included in this glossary.
For Merklinger’s reference to a chajja in
Mandu’s
architecture,
see
Sultanate
Architecture of Pre-Mughal India, 160.
BL Or 13718, ff. 59b-60a.
The second example appears on Ibid, f. 92b,
lines 8-9.
BL Or 13718, f. 60b.
This is a detached folio from Süleymaniye Aya
Sofia MS 3606 now in the Freer Gallery of Art,
F1932.19.
al-Jazarī, Al-Jāmi‘ bayn al-‘ilm w’al-‘amal alnāfi‘ fī ṣinā‘at al-ḥiyal, 580.
Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English
Dictionary, 595. If calling the balcony in Arabic
a rawshan may have been perceived as a register
shift from one language to another, this may
explain why Shadiyabadi includes the word chajah.
M. A. Dhaky, ed., Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple
Architecture: North India Beginnings of Medieval
Idiom, ca. A.D. 900-1000, Vol. II, Part 3: Text
(American Institute of Indian Studies: New Delhi,
1998) 147-85, 406, 410, plates 373 and 390, and
“The Genesis and Development of Māru-Gurjara
Temple Architecture,” in Studies in Indian Temple
Architecture, ed. Pramod Chandra (New Delhi:
American Institute of Indian Studies, 1975) 134–5,
also refers to the khuracchādya, or curved and
ribbed eave or awning.
South Asian Studies
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
Vaman Shivaram Apte, Revised and enlarged
edition of Prin. V. S. Apte’s The practical
Sanskrit-English dictionary (Poona: Prasād
Prakāshan, 1957–59) 716.
Kalika Prasad, Bṛhat Hindī Kosh (Vārāṇāsī:
Jñānamaṇḍala, 1965) 260. “chatkā dīvār ke
bāhar nikalā hūā bhāg.”
Elizabeth Merklinger, Sultanate architecture of
Pre-Mughal India (New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal, 2005) 160.
Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture: An outline of
its history and development, 1526-1858 (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002) 137–8.
As a preface to her glossary, Koch states, “the
meaning of vernacular terms has, where possible, been derived from Mughal sources of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sanskritderived terms which were adopted by the
Mughals are transliterated according to their
spelling by Mughal authors.”
Merklinger, Sultanate architecture of PreMughal India, 100.
My forthcoming book, Worldshaping Wonders:
Manuscripts and Experience in Hindustan,
treats the traces of the vernacular in the diagrams, especially the case of Shadiyabadi’s
mahout.
Saryu Doshi, “Colour, Motif, and Arabesque,”
in India and Egypt: Influences and Interactions,
eds. Saryu Doshi and Mostafa El Abadi, Marg
45, no. 2 (1993): 112-35, and Brac de la
Perrière, “Du Caire à Mandu.” Finbarr Barry
Flood’s reading of the foundational inscription
at the Congregational Mosque of Mandu (completed 1454) has stressed that it was called
a nuskhah (copy) of the Great Mosque of
Damascus. See Flood, “Idea and Idiom:
Knowledge as Praxis in South Asian and
Islamic Architecture,” Ars Orientalis 45
(2015): 153n8. See Zafar Hasan, “The inscriptions of Dhār and Māṇdū,” Epigraphia IndoMoslemica (1909-10): pl. XI where the naskh
inscription clearly reads, “nuskhah bayt alḥarām.”
Elias Muhanna, The World in A Book: Al-Nuwayri
and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2018), 56-65.
Richard T. Mortel, “Madrasas in Mecca during
the Medieval Period: A Descriptive Study based
on Literary Sources,” Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of
London 60 no. 2 (1997): 236–52, bases his survey of the Meccan madrasahs on the writings of
Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Fāsī
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
227
(1323-1429) and Najm al-Dīn ‘Umar ibn Fahd
(d. 1480).
Ibid, 244-49.
John L. Meloy, “ ‘Aggression in the Best of
Lands’: Mecca in Egyptian-Indian Diplomacy
in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century,” in Mamluk
Cairo: Crossroads for Embassies, eds. Malika
Dekkiche and Frédéric Bauden (Leiden: Brill,
2018); BnF MS Arabe 4400, f. 181a; Aḥmad
Darrāj, “Risālatān bayna Sulṭān Mālwa
wa’l-Ashraf Qāytbāy,” Majallat Ma‘had alMakhṭūṭāt al-‘Arabiyyah 4 (1958): 112. The
manuscript containing these letters, BnF MS
Arabe 4400, has received attention from
Malika Dekkiche, “The Letter and Its
Response: The Exchanges between the Qara
Qoyunlu and the Mamluk Sultan: MS Arabe
4440 (BnF, Paris),” Arabica 63 (2016): 579626. Meia Walravens, “Arabic as a Language
of the South Asian Chancery: Bahmani
Communications to the Mamluk Sultanate,”
Arabica 67 no. 4 (2020): 409–435, explores
similar issues for the Bahmani sultanate.
Meloy, “Aggression in the Best of Lands.”
Bodleian MS Elliot 237, ff. 263a-264a.
Mortel, “Madrasas in Mecca during the
Medieval Period,” 246.
Elizabeth
Lambourn,
“Carving
and
Communities: Marble Carving for Muslim
Patrons at Khambhāt and around the Indian
Ocean Rim, Late Thirteenth—Mid-Fifteenth
Centuries,” Ars Orientalis 34 (2004): 107.
Lambourn’s study of the list of luggage of an
Indian Ocean merchant in the Geniza documents
reconstructs an earlier, twelfth-century micro history of these pathways of portability. See
Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in
the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Selma Al-Radi, The ‘Amiriya in Rada‘: the history and restoration of a sixteenth-century
madrasa in the Yemen, ed. Robert Hillenbrand
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 86-7;
Venetia Porter, “The Architectural Decoration,”
in The ‘Amiriya in Rada‘: the history and
restoration of a sixteenth-century madrasa in
the Yemen, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 121.
Al-Radi, The ‘Amiriya of Rada‘, 90, 94; Brand,
“The Khalji Complex in Shadiabad, Mandu
(India),” 117-20.
Al-Radi, The ‘Amiriya of Rada‘, 90, 99.
Ruth Barnes, “The Painted Ceiling of the
‘Amiriya. An Influence from Indian Textiles,”
228
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
V. Gupta
in The ‘Amiriya in Rada‘: the history and
restoration of a sixteenth-century madrasa in
the Yemen, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997) 139–47.
Vivek Gupta, “Interpreting the Eye (‘ain):
Poetry and Painting in the Shrine of Aḥmad
Shāh al-Walī al-Bahmanī (r. 1422—1436),”
Archives of Asian Art 67 no. 2 (2017): 189-208.
Bodleian MS Elliot 237, ff. 261b-264a; Day,
Medieval Malwa, 213.
Bodleian MS Elliot 237, f. 261b.
This date is based on Upendra Nath Day’s reading of the manuscript. See Medieval Malwa, 213.
Bodleian MS Elliot 237 f. 261b. “avvalān tuḥfah
kih ma‘dan-i javāhir bijānib-i ‘ālimiyān va
manba‘-i āb-i ḥayāt jahāniyān ast ya‘nī muṣḥaf-i
mujīd va furqān-i ḥamīd kih dīdah baṣīrat aw law
al-abṣār az tajallī-yi mutajallī shavad.”
Ibid, “thāniyān khātimī kih khātim-i sulaymān
zīr dast nigīn-i ū va nigīn-i zarīn-i khūrshīd
dast-i khūsh angushtarīn ūst.”
Ibid, f. 262a. “thālithān shamshīrī kih az tīzī-yi ū
tīgh-i āftāb bī-tāb shudah dar bi-nām-i ufuq
mukhtafī shavad.”
Ibid, ff. 263a-264a. Interestingly, on folio 263b,
the letter also mentions a majlis that the
Mamluks hosted in Mecca in honor of
a certain Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Sindī alTarjumān (the Translator).
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
Ibid, f. 264a-b. This is corroborated by
‘Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn ‘Umar al-Makkī alĀṣafī Ulughkhānī, Ẓafar al-wālih bi-Muẓaffar
wa-ālih [An Arabic history of Gujarat], ed.
E. Denison Ross, 3 vols. (London: John
Murray, 1910-28), vol. 1, 204, written in the
early seventeenth century. Also see, Meloy,
“Aggression in the Best of Lands.”
Brac de la Perrière, “Du Caire à Mandu.”
The Timurid ruler, Abū Sa‘īd Mirzā, also sent
an emissary to Mandu in 1468. Bodleian MS
Elliot 237, f. 302a; Day, Medieval Malwa, 213.
Flatt, “Practicing Friendship,” 69; Ibid, The
Courts of the Deccan Sultanates, 188-97; and,
Walravens, “Arabic as a Language of the South
Asian Chancery.” For an earlier study of Gāvān,
see Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan,
1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006) 59–77.
See Truitt, Medieval Robots, and Angela
Vanhaelen, “Strange Things for Strangers:
Transcultural Automata in Early Modern
Amsterdam,” The Art Bulletin 103 no. 3
(2021): 42-68.
Disclosure Statement
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South Asian Studies
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rsas20
Routes of Translation: Connected Book Histories
and al-Jazari’s Robotic Wonders from the Mamluks
to Mandu
Vivek Gupta
To cite this article: Vivek Gupta (2023) Routes of Translation: Connected Book Histories and alJazari’s Robotic Wonders from the Mamluks to Mandu, South Asian Studies, 39:2, 207-228, DOI:
10.1080/02666030.2023.2287840
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2023.2287840
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Published online: 25 Mar 2024.
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