Many art historians are familiar with the work produced in India during the period of Mughal rule (1526–1857). All surveys of world art illustrate the Taj Mahal, the stunning tomb commissioned by the emperor Shah Jahan for his wife on the bank of the Yamuna River at Agra. Most surveys also include pages from the magnificent albums compiled for the Mughals, whether intricate scenes of court receptions with splendid arrays of bejeweled courtiers or stunning studies of individual animals and birds. (Those interested can see some of these album pages in the exhibition currently traveling around the United States or its catalogue by Elaine Wright, Muraqqa‘: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library [Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 2008].) But many scholars, even specialists in the arts of India or the Islamic lands, may be less familiar with the books produced in the preceding centuries when much of northern and central India was under the role of various Muslim sultanates. This material is the subject of Éloïse Brac de la Perrière’s new survey, L’art du livre dans l’Inde des sultanates. Published by Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne as the third volume in a series on Islamic art established by the late Marianne Barrucand (the earlier two are L’Égypte fatimide: Son art et son histoire, 1999, the proceedings of a colloquium held in Paris the previous year, and Anna Caiozzo’s 2003 monograph, Images du ciel d’Orient au Moyen Âge), Brac de la Perrière’s book is based on her dissertation presented there in October 2003.

In recent decades the art and architecture of India under Muslim rule have been the focus of much scholarship. This has happened not only because of the difficulty getting to many core areas in the Islamic lands, but also because of a shift in interest, in this field as in others, from center to periphery and a new concern with hybridity and the mixing of local traditions with imported features in forging identity. The architectural monuments of the sultanate period are relatively well studied (as in the volume edited by Finbarr Barry Flood, Piety and Politics in the Early Indian Mosque [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]), but the arts of the book, generally reckoned the second most important medium, have received less attention, and for good reason. Whereas most architectural monuments are in situ and are often dated or mentioned in texts, this is not the case with manuscripts: relatively few have survived, perhaps because of the humid climate in the region, and those that do are often in poor condition, either damaged or dispersed, and are rarely dated, signed, or otherwise localized. Furthermore they display a wide variety of styles. And to add to the problem, contemporary authors rarely mention the subject of book production. Brac de la Perrière is thus to be given much credit for undertaking this pioneering survey of the illuminated and illustrated manuscripts produced in this turbulent period.

The disparate and varied nature of the material and the relative paucity of primary and even secondary sources available to study it shape Brac de la Perrière’s methodology and purpose: an examination of the book from commission to execution—including the choice of materials (support, inks, and pigments) and tools (pens, rulers, etc.), as well as the different steps in the preparation of the codex, including illumination and illustration—in order to define the characteristic traits of the Indo-Islamic codex (which she carefully defines as any manuscript written in Arabic script, whether in Arabic, Persian, or other language) produced during the period of sultanate rule. She further determines, with the help of texts, the existence of schools attached to certain sites of production. Her work thus partakes of a recent (and to my mind welcome) trend in the field in moving beyond the connoisseurship of individual paintings and styles to consider the book as a whole and its role as a cultural signifier.

Chapter 1 surveys the meager evidence relating to places of production, artists, and patrons, including not only princes and high-ranking nobles but also Sufis or mystics, especially members of the well-organized Chistiyya and Suhrawardiyya orders who used some of these manuscripts in teaching. In chapter 2, Brac de la Perrière moves to the meat of her subject, defining the corpus of study: forty-eight illustrated manuscripts and individual folios whose Indo-Islamic provenance rests on relatively certain grounds, ranging from colophon to style. Noting the problems with older classification systems, Brac de la Perrière sets out a new one, dividing the material into five groups that are determined by chronology or subject matter. (Appendix 1 gives brief descriptions of the individual manuscripts and details about their publications.)

The first two groups are the most closely tied to traditional Persian subjects and thirteenth- and fourteenth-century painting styles (simple compositions set on a flat ground with little indication of depth, red or plain ground, large plants, and sky delineated as polychrome bands), and therefore Brac de la Perrière attributes these two groups to the fifteenth century. Group 1 (nos. 1–6) is the most traditional, whereas Group 2 (nos. 7–14) is more clearly Indian, introducing new subjects, such as the Chandayana, the romance composed in 781/1379 by the Sufi poet Mawala Da’ud in Avadhi (the vernacular language spoken in Uttar Pradesh), and new motifs, such as the protruding eye and sartorial details of Indian dress and jewelry. With Group 3 (nos. 15–28), she arrives on firmer codicological and historical grounds, as it comprises fourteen manuscripts that are intact (or largely so) and sometimes localized and dated. With paintings inspired by contemporary or near-contemporary Persian models made for Timurid or Aq Qoyunlu princes in Iran, this group is attributed to the sixteenth century. Group 4 (nos. 29–30bis), a tiny set of two incomplete copies of the Chandayana and a dispersed folio from a related text, fuses iconographic and stylistic elements from the Persianate and non-Islamic Indian, notably Jain, repertories to create an original style that Brac de la Perrière dates to the period 1520–70, technically after the Mughal prince Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last of the Delhi sultans, at Paniput but before the Mughal style had become ubiquitous. Finally, Group 5 (nos. 31–48), one-third of the total corpus, comprises copies of the Koran and a related compendium, most of them transcribed in the distinctive loopy script known as “bihari,” that were produced throughout the period.

The division into five groups sets the stage for the next four chapters on individual features of the codices: material and techniques, layout (mis en page), script, and illumination and illustration. I wish, therefore, that the author had spent more time spelling out the criteria she used in selecting her corpus of manuscripts that can be considered sultanate; she states that her criteria (57) are by an attested dating or localization or by graphic, iconographic, or technical similarities. Her appendix 2 lists nearly one hundred and fifty works that can be attributed to sultanate India, so it would be helpful to know exactly which criteria operated in the case of individual manuscripts and why other manuscripts were excluded from the corpus of forty-eight. For example, the well-known copy of the Shahnama in the British Library (Or. 1403) dated 841/1438 and once owned by Jules Mohl uses peori, the bright so-called Indian yellow made from cows fed on mango; and as Brac de la Perrière notes (103), this manuscript in Turkman style must be attributed to sultanate India, but it is not part of her corpus. Knowing her specific criteria would make her methodology clearer and her survey more useful in localizing other manuscripts, many of whose attributions to sultanate India are disputed and/or disputable.

Brac de la Perrière’s detailed analysis of the codices’ physical features brings her to two concluding chapters considering stylistic hybridity and the mechanisms of transmission in sultanate painting. She discusses the contributions of other Islamic traditions, not only Persian but also Mamluk models, and the interaction with local, notably Jain, traditions. She concludes that sultanate book production probably began only in the late fourteenth century, perhaps encouraged by the diffusion of paper, and discusses possible centers of production, notably the city of Mandu in the Malwa region. And finally she points to some new areas of possible study, such as the relationship between sultanate and Ottoman painting. Another would be further technical analysis. For example, the paper in only one manuscript (no. 1, a copy of Amir Khusraw’s Khamsa in the Freer Gallery) has been analyzed. It includes hemp, a material not common in other papers used in the Islamic lands, but without further analyses we do not know whether hemp is a hallmark of Indian production. The same might be discovered for certain pigments.

Brac de la Perrière’s handbook stands as the major guide to the enigmatic and diverse field of book production in sultanate India. Clearly laid out, well documented with bibliography, glossary, and index, and adequately illustrated (though sometimes the illustrations show only the painting and so are useless when discussing layout or calligraphy), it is a pioneering work by a young scholar that has rightfully qualified her to succeed her professor as Maître de Conferences in Islamic art at the Sorbonne.