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The Oldest Printed Shāhnāma Illustrations
In the latter part of my recently published article, "Picturing Prophethood: The K. R. Cama Oriental Institute Zarātushtnāma Manuscript HP 149 and the Origins of Portraits of the Prophet Zarathushtra," I discuss the establishment of lithographic printing (chāp-i sangī) presses in the city of Bombay during the first half of the nineteenth century. Recently, there has been great interest among art historians in the history of illustrated lithographs, especially those in Persian and Urdu, and above all, the Shāhnāma, the Persian Book of Kings. Ulrich Marzolph's Narrative Illustration in Persian Lithographed Books (2001) and his آلبوم شاهنامه: تصویرهای جاپ سنگی شاهنامۀ فردوسی (with Mohammad Hadi Mohammadi, 2006) have made hundreds of beautiful nineteenth-century lithographed miniatures available to modern audiences, and have blazed a trail in illuminating the unstudied world of the nineteenth-century book illustrator. Yet the early history of the lithographed miniature remains very much an open question. Some years ago, while I was browsing the shelves in the "Special Collections" room of Bombay's New and Secondhand Bookstore in Dhobi Talao, I came across a Gujarati translation of the Shamshīrkhānī abridgment of the Shāhnāma entitled the Rostamnāmũ (The Book of Rustam), translated by the famous Fardunji Marzbānji, the first Parsi proprietor of a printing press in Bombay and the founder of the Muṃbai Samāchar newspaper. This Rostamnāmũ was typeset and printed on Marzbanji's Daftar Āśkārā press in 1843. The text was named in honor of Śeṭh Rustamji Kāvasji Banāji of Calcutta (1792 – 1852), an opium merchant, banker, and ship-builder, and one of the leading philanthropists of the Kadmi Zoroastrian community. As I leafed through the book, I was surprised to see that it contained 26 lithographic illustrations, drawn by a (presumably Hindu) artist named "S. Cassinathsett". While the images lack the elaborate detail of later lithographic illustration, the text is remarkable as the oldest printed Shāhnāma with illustrations. For that matter, these might well be the oldest lithographed miniatures anywhere in the Persian-speaking world (Marzolph lists a certain Laylī va Majnūn of Maktabī, also printed in 1843, with four lithographed illustrations, which I have been unable to locate). While it might be surprising that the oldest Shāhnāma lithographed images should occur in a Gujarati, rather than a Persian, recension of the text, it should be noted that the Daftar Āśkārā press was also a prolific publisher of Persian texts in mid-century Bombay. Lithography was already being used for Persian printing in Bombay by 1826, with the publication of the شواهد النفیسه فی الاثبات الکبیسه by Ḥājī Muḥammad al-Iṣfahānī, a work published during the heyday of the Parsi calendar wars. While printers experimented with lithographing Gujarati between the 1820s-1840s, by the mid-1840s, Gujarati was routinely typeset while Persian was typically lithographed. It is quite possible that printers at presses like Daftar Āśkārā also found work at other printing houses in Bombay and brought knowledge of lithographic illustration with them, which very quickly began to be applied to Persian texts. Three illustrated Persian Shāhnāmas printed through the lithographic process appeared in Bombay between 1846 and 1856, and lithographic illustration rapidly spread across the Persian printing presses of the subcontinent, where it were exported to Iran and elsewhere. Since the text of Rostamnāmũ is so rare and to my knowledge has not yet been noted in scholarship, I thought that it would be useful to post images from the text here. Two illustrations (# 16 and # 21) are missing from my book, while illustration # 22 has been included twice. While most of the illustrations are printed on single sheets of paper, some are tipped in and folded, while others are printed over two bound sheets. Unlike later Persian lithographed illustration, the miniature never occurs on the same page as the text, presumably because the text pages are typeset. In any case, I hope that you enjoy this treasure of early Shāhnāma printing as much as I do! The English and Gujarati Title Pages of the Rostamnāmũ (1843) 1. The Court of Gayomars. Click on the thumbnails below for higher resolution images:
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Food History, India, and Iran
I was recently asked to give a talk on food, history, and the Persianate world for the Society of Scholars of Zoroastrianism conference last month. The talk was pre-taped, and since several of my colleagues and friends have been asking for it, I thought that I ought to post it here. જમવા ચાલોજી and نوش جان ! |
King Gushtasp Bahman of Cathay and Khotan, the Zoroastrian Prester John
![]() From a 17th century English map of China, depicting the area from Khotan (Cotam) to Cathay, with its capital Khānbāliq (Cambalu).
In the course of my research, I often come across episodes and anecdotes that I find very striking but difficult to convey in an academic format. Such was the case with the (fake) Zoroastrians of Cathay and Khotan. It was while reading the autobiography of Dasturji M. N. Dhalla that I first came across a reference to the kingdom of Cathay and Khotan. As a student of Oktor Skjærvø, one of the greatest living authorities on ancient Khotan, I have a degree of familiarity with things Khotanese. However, the Khotan that Dhalla described had virtually nothing to do with the Khotan that I was acquainted with. According to Dhalla, a Muslim traveller named Sayyed Husayn had come to Bombay in 1840, claiming to hail from the land of Cathay and Khotan. Sensationally, Sayyed Husayn claimed that his homeland was ruled by a Zoroastrian king named Gushtasp Bahman, and the people there spoke Zand and Pāzand, though they knew a little Turkish too; needless to say, this immediately attracted the attention of a crowd of Parsis. Now, when talking with Parsi friends, I have been told many times, often in hushed tones, that there exist large Zoroastrian communities in addition to the familiar communities in India and Iran – supposed hordes of crypto-Zoroastrians in Tajikistan, the Sāheb-Dilān under Mt. Damavand in Iran, or even Zoroastrians who went to Germany after the fall of the Sasanian Empire. These tall tales echoed in my ears as I read Dhalla's description; I had always imagined that believing in the existence of the crypto-Zoroastrian groups was a late nineteenth century phenomenon, when theosophy, ilm-e khshnoom, and Iranian nationalism were all in vogue. But in the 1840's, Parsi intellectual engagement with such phenomena was still a few decades away. Before proceeding, let me point out that it would not have been totally absurd for a Parsi in 1840's Bombay to believe that there might actually be a Zoroastrian kingdom in Western China. After all, the Iranian Zoroastrian community in Yazd and Kerman had lost touch with the Indian Zoroastrians until the first Rivāyats were exchanged, and they seemed genuinely surprised to find out that they had co-religionists elsewhere. Zoroastrian communities must have persisted in Central Asia until a fairly late date: both the Rivāyats of Shāpūr Bharūchī (1570 AD) and Kāʼūs Māhyār (~ 1600 AD) mention behdīn communities in Samarqand. And the regions of Western China lay almost entirely unexplored by outsiders until a bit later in the 19th century. That said… After reading Dhalla's short description of the incident, I turned to the Pārsi Prakāś to see what I could find out. Sure enough, PP describes the incident in detail. According to PP, Sayyed Husayn was an itinerant Muslim staying in the house of the well-known Iranian merchant Āghā Muhammad Rahīm Shīrāzī. He related to them:
What must it have been like to have been a Parsi hearing those words? Twelve hundred and ten years since the accession of the known Zoroastrian monarch, Yazdegerd III, and all of a sudden you hear of a king more splendid than even the king of Iran. Not only that, but they collect the jizya poll-tax, that same tax which had reduced their Zoroastrian brethren in Qajar Iran to poverty, from the Muslims who live in their kingdom. My, how the tables had turned. In nineteenth century Bombay, Parsis would have been used to hearing fantastic stories of China. In the 1840's, Parsis still by and large consumed Indo-Persianate literature, and popular Persian romances continued to be published in Gujarati translation through much of the 20th century. In Persian literature, like in the Medieval West, China was connected to all things fantastic and amazing. Legends of Khatā-o-Khotan, Chīn-o-Māchīn, intertwined with stories of Alexander the Great, Khizr, Gog and Magog (Yaʼjūj & Maʼjūj), fantastic kings, and fairy princesses, had entranced and entertained Persian audiences for many generations. Stories of a Zoroastrian monarch in Khānbāliq (the Turkic name for Beijing) are strongly reminiscent of the Medieval Christian Prester John legend, the powerful Christian monarch ruling in the land of the infidels, near Earthly Paradise, memorably captured in Umberto Eco's Baudolino. Yet the sayyed's description also confirms what Parsis believed about themselves in the 19th century – the Zoroastrians of Cathay and Khotan are monotheists. For Zoroastrian theologians since medieval times, proving that Zoroastrians were khudāparast or yektāparast – monotheist – despite what appeared to be dualism in ancient scriptures and other sources, was to be a key occupation. In the 1840's, the term khodāparast had a unique resonance with Bombay Parsis since it is exactly what the British missionaries, led by the Rev. John Wilson, claimed that they weren't. Beginning in 1831, Parsis had been under constant attack in the missionary press for falsely claiming monotheistic belief. The Bombay Tract Society, under the control of the Scottish Missionaries, published a book a few years later in 1851 entitled Pārsio Khodāparast Che ke Nahīṃ (Are the Parsis Monotheists or Aren't they?), in which it was alleged that was alleged that Parsis were angel-worshippers, sky-worshippers, sun-worshippers, moon-worshippers, star-worshippers, light-worshippers, air-worshippers, world-worshippers, sea-worshippers, spring-worshippers, fire-worshippers, plant-worshippers, Zarathustra-worshippers, Fravashi-worshippers, Gatha-worshippers, Geh-worshippers, worshippers of the Mazdayasnian Dīn, animal worshippers, etc. – everything except for khodāparast "monotheists" (the original text appears to the left – note the threatening use of boldface). So for the Zoroastrians of Cathay and Khotan to be real *monotheists* was in a sense a vindication of the Parsi self-identification. After an assembly at Sir Jamshedji Jijibhai's Mahālakṣmi garden, it was decided that a letter should be composed in Persian to be sent to the king of Cathay and Khotan. Śeṭh Ḍośābhāi Sorābji Munśi, famous for being the Persian teacher of Sir Richard Burton, was hired to write the letter, quoted below:
After paying Sayyed Husayn 1000 rupees (no small amount in 1840, enough to buy two chests of opium) to carry the letter back to the Kingdom of Cathay and Khotan, he disappeared and was never heard from again. Even before giving him the money, many Parsis suspected a hoax, like Navrozji Fardunji, who had been to Kābul and was suspicious of the Sayyid's vague answers to his questions about Central Asian roads. Yet, cruel as the hoax was, Munśi's letter is nonetheless a remarkable document, something of a religious "wishlist" of a small Indian community seeking connections to the authority of a greater, more ancient imagined (or in this case, imaginary) community in order to help solve contemporary controversies and to finally help resolve the communal sense of loss that had endured since the incursions of Alexander the Great and later the Islamic conquest of Iran. And so, the next time you hear someone tell you about the hordes of Zoroastrians in Central Asia which will somehow revitalize the community, think of the Zoroastrian Kingdom of Cathay and Khotan. Captain Alexander Burnes's letter to Navrozji Fardunji
about the hoax. |
Welcome!
![]() ![]() Welcome to my website. There’s a lot of work to do, but I hope that this site will give you some idea of
my work. More importantly, I hope that the resources on this website will be useful to anyone interested in Zoroastrian studies. Let me tell you a bit about two of the projects I’m developing on this site.
First, I’ve been working on a bibliographical survey for works written by Zoroastrian authors. Remarkably few in-depth surveys of Zoroastrian literature have been undertaken, and only a small handful have even briefly medieval and modern literature. Instead, scholars-in-training have to obtain bibliographical knowledge piecemeal, through well-worn scans of photocopies of photocopies (sometimes stretching back through generations of scholars). I intend this to encompass Zoroastrian literature in its broadest sense, from the Avesta to 21st century Persian and Gujarati literature. Since Persian and Gujarati literature are paradoxically the largest corpora yet also the least known, I have begun developing these guides first and hope to be able to offer a guide soon.
Second, as some of my scholarly friends know, I have been on something of a quest to increase awareness about Zoroastrian Gujarati literature. Though literally thousands of books have been written by Parsis in Gujarati, this huge body of literature, much of which bears directly on other areas of Zoroastrian Studies, received virtually no scholarly attention over the course of the last century. To help rectify this problem, I have been working on a Parsi Gujarati Reader – graded excerpts from longer with glossaries and grammatical commentaries both to expose the interested student to the great variety that exists in Gujarati and to help them gain a working understanding of the language. It will be a long process before the course is usable by students with no prior experience, but for now, with the assumption of a basic knowledge of the language such as that gained through a book like Teach Yourself Gujarati, I have already put up one lesson and hope to add a lesson to the site every week.
So, with the great Ardeshir Darashah Seth from Duḥkhī Dādībā, let me welcome you to my “home,” and hope that you’ll visit again and again. سلام & સાહેબજી! |