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Shri Partap Singh Museum A Collabrative Restoration Project of UNESCO & INTACH - J & K Chapter |
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The Manuscript section of SPS museum contains a wide range of objects including books, royal edicts (farmans), deeds etc. dating from the seventeen centuries old Gilgit Manuscripts to Persian, Kashmiri and Arabic works written as late as 19th century. These handwritten manuscripts are on a host of writing materials ranging from the bark of the birch tree (bhoj patra or burza) to fine, Kashmiri hand made paper, known in local parlance as koshur kaghaz. The rulers of Kashmir were known from the earliest time as being patrons of literature. As such various works celebrated throughout the Indian subcontinent dealing with religion, philosophy, history etc were composed in the land. Amongst others these include Nilmath Purana, Virath Katha, and the chronicles of Kashmir; Rajtrangani. These early manuscripts including to what is referred to as Gilgit manuscript, belong to the pre-Islamic era of Kashmir. Mostly in Sharda or Sanskrit (occasionally in Pali script) these works have been written on birch bark, the only available, durable writing material in Kashmir at that time. This fact gives credence to the commonly held belief that the use of paper in the valley was introduced during the Sultanate period in the 14th Century AD by Sultan Zain-ul Abideen, who sent two natives to Samarkand for this purpose. These early manuscripts used to comprise separate or loose pages, mostly with the writing on a single leaf. The various pages comprising a single folio were held together by means of wooden clogs or bounded together with bands of colored silk, much in the same manner as that still practiced in the various Buddhist monastic libraries of Ladakh. This was due to the religious sensitivity that virtually forbade the use animal hide (leather cover) for binding the sacred texts. Due to the undulating surface of the birch, the folios dating back to this period exhibit a pronounced unevenness of the surface and the coarse, granular structure of the bark mars the overall appearance of the texts making fine penmanship virtually impossible. Thus the use of a flatter wider brush can be clearly discerned in all surviving texts written on birch bark.The discovery of the Gilgit manuscript with its miniature paintings has helped in establishing the fact that the notion of book decoration was prevalent in Kashmir even before the advent of Islam. In fact though the paintings in the Gilgit manuscript are assigned to the Kashmir school of painting in vogue during the 9th century but stylistically, they may date back to the 7th-8th century. These paintings depict an eclectic style showing influences that can be traced to Gupta Indian, Gandhara, Central Asian and Iran.Down the ages this tradition of manuscript writing was further advanced during the Muslim rule, when numerous Arabic and Persian works were either composed or copied for the use of the ruling elite . Additionally a host of royal libraries established by different Sultans from 15th century onwards, ensured the need for producing copies of books that were considered to be an essential part of the civilized worlds. Numerous mediaeval historians have written about these royal libraries which contained thousand of hand written manuscripts. These include books on religion and theology including Koran, work of secular nature like Shah Nameh, Dewan-i-Hafiz, Golistan, Boostan , philosophical, scientific and literary works as well as various histories dealing not only with Kashmir but also the wider Muslim world. A marked shift during this period was the emergence of an urban bourgeois class, with members dedicated to the patronage of the literature. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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