The Book of Timur in India
English PhD student Ananya Bhardwaj recently had a wonderful encounter with a 16th-century folio of The Book of Timur in India (see a digital facsimile at Harvard Arts Museum). The Timurnama is a 15th-century poem by the Persian poet Hatefi about the life of the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur.
Ananya is writing a dissertation entitled “The Empire Gives Meaning: Migrants’ Stories of Land Dispossession, Climate Crisis, and Planetary Exclusions.”
PhD student Ananya Bhardwaj photographed with the 16th-century folio of the Book of Timur in Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna, India.
While in India, she had an opportunity to examine closely a beautiful folio of the Timurnama over the winter break, 2024. Read her story below.
From Ananya Bhardwaj
I recently visited the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library located in my birthplace, Patna, India, to see the original folio of the Timurnama (Book of Timur). The Timurnama is a beautifully gilded and illustrated manuscript, commissioned by the Great Mughal Emperor, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, sometime around 1584 CE. This original folio, one of the very famous Early Modern manuscripts of the Indian subcontinent, still survives and is meticulously preserved for generations in Bihar at the Khuda Bakhsh Library. Luckily, this folio wasn’t plundered and looted by the British, a fate that befell many of our subcontinental gems like the Akbarnama. This folio narrates the history of Akbar’s ancestor, Timur, and his descendants in Iran and India.
Not only is this manuscript embellished with the royal seals of all the Mughal Emperors who have seen and read it, it also has a foreword in the writing of Shah Jahan himself, the commissioner of the Taj Mahal in 1631. In this foreword, the Mughal Emperor, Shah Jahan, affirms the commissioning of the Timurnama by his Shah Baba (his grandfather, Akbar). It has some of the most beautiful and richly detailed paintings, one even by the famous Mughal miniature painter Daswanth right before his death in 1584 at the age of 24. A couple of these paintings have in text descriptions as well which enables one to read the folio as a predecessor of what we call a graphic novel!
I am thankful, immensely, to the Khuda Bakhsh Library and all the workers there, who were so enthusiastic in fanning this stubbornness of mine, to see the folio. Getting all the necessary permissions was not an easy task and therefore, thanks are also due to the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, for allowing me to see it and flip it and feel the 400 year old manuscript in my very hands—the manuscript which was once held by Akbar the Great!
