1 Introduction¹

The original context of the social embeddedness of manuscripts and other textual artefacts is often neglected within the traditional study of Islamic codicology and philology. Many manuscript and rare book collections are now carefully stored in hygienic and visually sanitized storage facilities, on metal shelves in grey conservation-grade boxes that belie little of their contents. Rarely do we have the opportunity to observe the manuscript in its original settings, with all of the attendant messiness of its social and devotional context and material surroundings. And when we do, as trained scholars the use of manuscripts “in the wild” may somehow strike us as improper or in need of reform. I recently watched a documentary about a family of Russian old believers who fled to the Siberian forest to live as hermits and evade persecution in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. Decades later, the sole surviving family member was filmed by the documentary-makers reciting her prayers in her abode in the midst of the wilderness using a beautifully illuminated liturgical manuscript, dirty with the grease of hands that had thumbed through its pages to recite prayers every day for generations. I remember thinking, “This is not the place for such a valuable manuscript, in the kitchen next to a wood stove in the forest,” and then the thought that immediately followed on its heels was: No, this is the correct context for such a manuscript, its original one, in the home of a believer who uses it every day in her kitchen to recite her prayers and devotions, one of whose ancestors perhaps copied or made it, with the accumulated births and deaths of relatives recorded in the margins or front pages, a whole microcosm of religious and family life encoded in its pages, which grow thinner and dirtier with the handling and meaning-making of each successive generation. The kitchen of an old believer hermit is the socially embedded site for this liturgical manuscript, rather than a museum or a sterile facility where only the elites of the academic world of the Global North could access it to further their careers and impose their—quite often extraneous and other times misguided—interpretations on it. The appearance of this unexpected illuminated manuscript in a documentary about a hermit in Siberia raises questions of whose epistemologies and exercises in meaning are valued by the archives and museums of the Global North, and why it is that only certain hegemonic forms of studying and using manuscripts are considered valid within the western academe. For that matter, we should problematize the conclusions that can be drawn and what can be “read” into a manuscript or other textual artefact, rather than the resonances of the worlds that the artefact inhabited before it entered the graveyard of the western archive or library.

The social context of manuscripts and lithographs that were used for divination deserves similar re-thinking. As someone who has worked in a large western library collection dealing with collections from South Asia and the Middle East, I see that these manuscripts and other works are entirely removed from a devotional or cultural context in which they are still considered tools for divination. They are also removed from a cultural context and epistemological framework in which they are used in order to access knowledge beyond the literal meaning of their text, the information they can provide on intellectual history, or conclusions about their materiality or visual qualities. That is to say, the study of these artefacts is limited to what can be derived from their textual contents; whereas, when they were used as divination texts or objects, reading their literal contents as a text was not always the reader’s primary objective in opening them. Rather, the words, formulae, magic squares, recipes, or illustrations that they contain were not the objects of focus, but rather a means to an end: to enacting magic, to seeing the unseen, or foretelling the future. Deprived of their original meaning and purposes, divination manuscripts find themselves removed from their original socially embedded context and its attendant ways of knowing and creating meaning.

To re-capture some of the original epistemic texture of these works, their context, creation, and use, in an attempt to employ the social codicology methodology for the study of these artefacts, I will examine a set of treatises from nineteenth-century South Asia, which illustrates how our understanding of what a manuscript does and what the nineteenth-century creators and readers of the manuscript understood it to do differ wildly. This is due to the epistemic shifts that have occurred over time, in part due to the Enlightenment episteme of western colonial modernity, which we struggle so often to escape when studying pre-modern manuscripts and thought systems. Another ideological culprit that prevents scholars from contextualizing early modern manuscripts is the de-valuing of non-hegemonic intellectual traditions that refuse to conform to the Enlightenment episteme which we attempt to evade. This de-valuing and marginalization of non-western knowledge traditions is paradoxical, considering that we as scholars are generally interested in the emic narrative of a manuscript and its tradition and context. Studying the original social context of the manuscript and what it meant to its creators and users (I do not say “readers” because not all uses of manuscripts, including divination manuscripts, involved literacy as we understand it, as parsing a text for the meaning that arises out of the joined letters and phrases) is one way perhaps to evade—or if not evade, at least momentarily have some respite from—the oppressively stubborn episteme that leads us to study the text as text, rather than as a magical object that renders the future visible or gives insight into unseen worlds and cosmological structures.

This paper will examine a corpus of nineteenth-century cosmological and divination treatises bearing titles that hint at both their use for magical practice and their genealogy within a longer tradition of socially situated manuscripts. This genre of texts, bearing titles such as the Tilismat-i ʿAjāʾib (Wondrous Talismans) and the Tuhfah-yi Tilismat (Rare or Marvellous Talismans) are heavily illustrated texts that defy our current scholarly understanding of the divisions and genres of pre-modern Islamic knowledge production while at the same time draw on and re-purpose a range of identifiable sources and visual programmes to formulate pathways for readers to create their own narrative of text and image. The treatise itself can be described as a pastiche, drawing in equal parts on a textual and visual lineage descending from Islamic cosmological and divinatory texts, illustrations, and practices while combining these historical texts with new technological methods of producing, altering, and re-producing images, juxtaposing and remediating them into new formulations—or possibilities—of meaning and practices of reading. I will argue that this genre of treatise also represents a challenge to notions of a colonial rupture in Islamic knowledge production, as the “disruptive” technologies that were introduced into nineteenth-century South Asia, such as lithography, in matter of fact allowed for the continuity of manuscript culture and the epistemic worlds encoded therein, as well as for the reformulation of these manuscript cultures into new forms of text, meaning, and genre in the form of mass-produced lithographs.

What are the ways that lithograph publishers remediate the text of cosmological manuscripts and their accompanying imagery, and what were the new ways of reading/using the manuscript-lithograph? Moreover, how do we situate these objects in their social context? To approach this question, some historical background is first necessary. The Tilism-i ʿAjāʾib/Tuhfah-yi Tilismat lithographed treatises and their genealogy within the constellation of manuscript texts and illustrations that gave rise to their formulation must first be established. Through exploring this genealogy, the entanglement and intervention of British colonial manuscript patronage in the circulation of courtly manuscript images becomes apparent, as does the role of itinerant South Asian craftsmen whose geographical dislocation was brought about by the social and political destruction and rupture of 1857. This context is essential to understanding how the transformation of manuscript genres and illustrative programmes into lithograph production occurred. After exploring the historical context of colonialism and material basis for the transmission of manuscript production from a limited scribal practice to the burgeoning lithograph industry in the north of the Indian subcontinent, it is possible to argue that the lithographed treatises at hand represent remediated cosmological and divinatory objects that challenge our historiographical notions of the epistemic rupture of modernity. Indeed, we may argue that these lithographs represent an epistemic and visual remediation by which the texts and imagery of an enchanted worldview are repurposed and mass-produced, not losing their aura of wonder but acquiring new accretions and layers of meaning as they circulate. After explaining this argument, it then becomes possible to situate the treatise in its social context more accurately. The lithographed codex is demonstrated to be an object used not just to convey an enchanted cosmological vision, but an object that moves beyond reliance on the text altogether to give the reader access to the future and the unseen through pictorial divination techniques.

The set of materials that sparked these reflections on the nature of print and the shift in popular visual culture and the Urdu readership’s relationship to texts and images of divination and cosmology is a corpus of treatises in the Vernacular Tract series housed in the British Library, London. These books were collected under the regulations of the 1867 Press and Registration of Books Act, a law that enabled colonial surveillance by legislating the systematic collection of all titles published in South Asian languages in British India and their deposit in the India Office Library and the Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts division of the British Museum. As these two collections were the founding materials for the British Library’s Asia and Africa Collections, and especially the South Asia printed books collection, they provide a broad picture of publishing across a range of South Asian languages, among which are the nineteenth-century Urdu-language lithograph publications that we will examine here. While there are numerous titles in the Urdu collections that treat many forms of divinatory practices from within the Islamicate intellectual tradition, there emerges from these materials a distinct genre of illustrated text constructed from a mélange of earlier texts, from cosmological and imagined geographical treatises to methods for interpreting dreams, to questions of healing, working magic, and making talismans, amulets, and other apotropaic objects.

Although scholarship of the Islamicate occult sciences is experiencing something of a renaissance of renewed academic interest at the moment, for many years the practice of divination was marginalized in scholarly understandings of the development of premodern Islamic social and intellectual history. One of the most important and comprehensive studies of divinatory practice is Toufic Fahd’s magisterial work La Divination Arabe, published in 1966 and considered to be the authoritative study of Islamic divination practices.² Although Fahd describes forty specific divination practices, I would argue that countless more probably existed at the level of popular practice that have not been documented in manuscripts or other forms of textual or material record. To give a sense of the range and variety of practices, among Fahd’s scholarly investigations are included the sciences of: taʿbīr al-aḥlām or oneiromancy (dreams—the highest form of divination, and considered to be an element of prophecy); ʿilm al-firāsa or physiognomy (or ascertaining an individual’s moral qualities and character from their outward appearance, also a prophetic quality); faʿl al-Qurʾān (or other text, such as the divan of Hafiz), or bibliomancy; ʿilm al-nujūm/aḥkām al-nujūm or astronomy/astrology; ʿilm al-ḥurūf or lettrism (divination through the letters of the alphabet); and many other forms of divination, such as predicting the future from throbbings in parts of the body, the flight of birds, intestines of sheep, cloud formations, from collections of painted images, and palmistry. Divination is today often viewed as a cultural practice, somehow divorced from the mainstream of Islamic religious belief and practice; however, this was certainly not the case historically, and arguably is not the case in the present. These many genres and forms of divinatory practice are represented in the Urdu lithographs in the Vernacular Tract collection, but more often than not these approaches to divination are combined in the form of a genre-bending pastiche of different texts and types of divination across what scholars would consider to be the subdivisions of the occult sciences.

2 The Spread of Print Culture in South Asia

Print culture in South Asia flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century with the widespread use of lithographic printing presses. The lithograph had been introduced to South Asia in the 1820s, and gained in popularity in the following decades,³ as it allowed scribes and illustrators to write and draw directly onto a lithographic stone using chemicals from which the images and words could be reprinted thousands of times. This method suited the scribes writing in Perso-Arabic scripts in South Asia, and in many respects, initial lithographic production in Persian and Urdu drew very heavily on traditions of Islamic manuscript production on the Indian subcontinent. The products of lithographic printing, including chromolithographic posters intended for devotional purposes, became widely visible in the public sphere, where they transformed ritual practices.⁴ While mass-produced illustrated Urdu-language lithographs have not received the same attention from Islamic art historians as courtly Persian manuscripts have enjoyed,⁵ Urdu-language lithographs draw on many of the same texts and visual programs, calligraphic traditions, and scribal cultures as their Persian predecessors while also transforming these previous modes of representation. Urdu lithographic production, to use the words of Christopher Pinney, “exists in a relationship of both continuity and disjunction with earlier image practices in India,”⁶ especially in relation to Persian illustrated manuscripts.

This article explores how the visual field of Urdu lithographs and print culture is deeply intertwined with Persianate manuscript production and British colonial patronage of the arts. The mass production of print allows the historian to reconstruct the practices of reading and using Urdu lithographs that rely on materiality to enact aspects of popular devotion, such as imagining the enchanted cosmos and using pictorial divination to predict the future. The re-ordering and mass dissemination of visual programs into new genres through practices of collage and pastiche gave new life and meaning to premodern Islamic cosmographical and talismanic iconography, problematising the notion of a ‘rupture’ with the Islamicate intellectual and devotional tradition of pre-modernity. Persianate visual tropes as well as the materiality of religious practices relating to divination and talisman-making were altered and also augmented by the shift in visual practice brought about by lithography.

Before approaching the cosmographic and divinatory lithographic texts, a word on magic—or devotional engagements with the supernatural—in the Islamic context is in order. Practices that today are considered to fall under the umbrella of “magic,” such as the creation of apotropaic images or writings, or divination through bibliomancy, oneiromancy or other means, were part and parcel of normal Muslim devotional practices and in many contexts, remain part of the social context of religious practice relating to writing and the use of codices, in particular. Travis Zadeh points out that many practices and beliefs that Western scholars of Islam consider to be outside of Muslim orthopraxy, such as the use of charms or the belief in jinn and supernatural elements, has, in Zadeh’s words, “historically occupied a rather normative place in Islamic soteriology. The categorization of such religious practices and beliefs as manifestations of superstitious magic forms part of the broader epistemological foundations of Orientalism, which viewed the Orient in general and Islam in particular as decadent, effeminate, and irrational.”⁷ He points out that the intellectual history of Islamic studies in the Western academy finds its roots in Orientalism and the Enlightenment, and that the sociological category of “popular” Islam has often been deployed to reflect derivative folk traditions on the periphery of Islamic civilization in contrast to “normative” forms of Islam, which are determined by legalistic approaches that are defined by the male religious elite.⁸ Gazing upon images of the Prophet’s belongings or depictions of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina was a practice considered to confer blessings upon the viewer, along with the touching of saints’ tombs, the tracing of venerated relics, and the rubbing or kissing of holy images and relics. These were all material aspects of premodern devotional practices. The ingesting of water in which the words of the Qurʾan or other writings have been dissolved was considered to carry a sacred valence and remains a widely accepted practice.⁹

The role that manuscripts and sacred imagery have played historically in Muslim devotional practice has attracted scholarly attention. Richard McGregor and Alexandra Bain have studied the role that manuscripts played in the devotional practices of Muslim believers, with particular attention to the imagery that the manuscripts featured, such as the Prophet’s footprint and his personal belongings, which allowed the reader or viewer to touch and thereby receive blessings through material contact with the image. Illuminated manuscripts with illustrations of this nature were largely confined to elite settings, such as a royal court or scholarly milieu. Other forms of devotional practice detailed in manuscripts, such as divination rituals or the making of talismans, were also restricted in their audience, by virtue of the circulation of the manuscript amongst a select group, either within a Sufi tariqa, a group of scholars, or a family lineage. With the advent of print, forms of devotion and the material imagery accompanying these practices would have circulated much more widely and reached a much larger audience. In the context of South Asia, not only did texts depicting cosmography, divination, and talisman-making translate their texts and images from a Persian manuscript tradition, but they also mixed the texts and images and adapted them into new genres and forms of devotional practice.¹⁰

3 Islamic Cosmological Manuscripts and Urdu Lithographic Production

Before examining the later Urdu lithograph production of cosmographical lithographs and related genres, some background is required to describe the manuscript tradition that was adapted by later Urdu lithograph artists in order to understand how this genre of manuscript came to be so prolifically reproduced and re-imagined in lithograph form. The manuscript in question is the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt wa-Gharāʾib al-Mawjūdāt (“The Wonders of Creation and Oddities of Existence”), authored by the Ilkhanid-era intellectual, al-Qazwini (1203–1283 CE).¹¹ Although he was not the first author to write a cosmological treatise of this title, his illustrated version of the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt, dated 1280 CE, shaped the Islamicate visual and spatial conceptualization of the cosmos for centuries.¹² The contents of the original ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt produced in 1280 CE depict the celestial and terrestrial realms. The first section describes the celestial realms and contains illustrations of the heavenly bodies and astronomical phenomena, the inhabitants of the celestial realm, such as angels, and time, accompanied by a discussion of different calendars and issues of chronology and temporality. The second section details the terrestrial realm and includes discussions of the four elements, meteors, and winds; the seven climates, with descriptions of the seas and rivers and explanations of the formations of mountains and wells; and the three kingdoms of nature: the mineral, vegetable, and animal. The first earthly creature to be discussed is the human being, then the other living beings according to the hierarchy of animals, birds, and then insects, followed by a final section on the “strange and peculiar” wonders, such as the tribe of Gog and Magog, and various odd forms, such as humans who do not possess necks, or who have outlandishly massive ears that they use as blankets, or humans with dog heads.¹³ Often heavily illustrated, this and later illustrated copies of the text have provided rich source material for Islamic art historians.¹⁴

The art-historical interpretation of the genre often centres on the spiritual and philosophical revelations that the aesthetic experience of viewing wondrous illustrations of God’s creation is intended to induce in the reader. Persis Berlekamp, a leading scholar in the study of the cosmological illustrations in al-Qazwini’s work, argues that the visual engagement with the striking imagery would arouse an aesthetic appreciation in the reader that would give rise to the awakening of the internal senses, thereby paving the way “for awe at God’s divinely ordained cosmos.”¹⁵ Art historians have also focused on how the text and its illustrations embody the Neoplatonic emanationist doctrine of Ibn Sina, and how al-Qazwini shaped his text and its visual program within this interpretive paradigm.¹⁶

The emanationist doctrine gave form to the structure of the text through its hierarchy of beings. The creatures of the celestial realms such as angels who were closest to God were described and depicted first in the text with striking illustrations. Creations located further from God, such as the beings of the terrestrial realm, were described later on in the text and given less elaborate illustrations. Both the celestial and terrestrial beings were subdivided into hierarchies, and Berlekamp argues in her extensive research on the cosmological illustrations that emerged in al-Qazwini’s work that the wonder-inducing purpose of the genre is evident most clearly in al-Qazwini’s own manuscript, and that the author himself explains in the introduction to his text that “every atom of substance and accident is characterized by and has as its attribute the wonders and oddities that appear within it, by the wisdom, power, majesty and greatness of God the Exalted,” and in addition to the wondrous elements of the world that can be seen with the eyes, he also includes the unseen realm (al-ghayb) as well. The illustrated manuscript genre of the “wonders of creation” has thus largely been understood by Islamic art historians as a tool for contemplating the complexity, variety, and magnificence of God’s cosmos as well as the mystery of the unknowable and the unseeable. There are clear echoes of this conceptual framework in the introduction and contents of the Tilismat-i ʿAjaʾib and the corpus of Urdu lithographs examined here, which adapt and combine the topics of cosmology, divination, and magic.

Along similar lines, the notion of the ʿajīb (wondrous), and the ʿajība (pl. ajāʾib, strange or wondrous things) seems to have remained remarkably consistent from al-Qazwini’s thirteenth-century CE formulation into nineteenth-century Persianate and Urdu-language lithograph culture. Al-Qazwini defines ʿajab as “the sense of bewilderment a person feels because of his inability to understand the cause of a thing,” and a gharīb was considered to be a subset of the ʿajāʾib, and is “any wondrous matter which occurs rarely and is contrary to what is commonly known, witnessed, and written about,” and as examples of gharāʾib (pl. of gharīb), al-Qazwini cites “miracles, eclipses, earthquakes, the evil eye, the unique characteristics of unusual souls, asteroids, snowfall out of season, the births of animals with strange forms, such as conjoined twins,” as well as “the stars, the human body, the bee.”¹⁷ Indeed, we encounter very similar subject matter and language in the writings not just of the later Urdu text that adapted this concept, the Tilismat-i Ajaʾib (“Talismans of Wonder”), but in similar texts as well, which we shall discuss shortly, in which the authors put emphasis on the rarity of the material presented in their treatises, pointing to a continuity with the earlier genres of texts dealing with the notion of the ʿajāʾib and gharāʾib.

However, a brief proviso is necessary to temper the notion of the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt genre as one that was written purely with the intention of evoking a sense of divine bewilderment in the reader. Syrinx von Hees argues that this idea of the peculiar and bizarre phenomena of the cosmos as evoking a sense of wonder in the reader is largely an invention of modern western scholarship. Orientalist scholars in the nineteenth century, their attention caught by the chapters on oddities in the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt with their corresponding illustrations, focused on these sections of the works and solidified their fixation into a genre in their scholarship on al-Qazwini and later authors of cosmological works.¹⁸ Despite von Hees’ critique of the secondary scholarship, it can still be materially demonstrated through the extant manuscript evidence that this genre of cosmological writing, while it underwent variation over time, remained stable in its conceptual underpinning although the content of its texts and the notion of what constitutes a “wonder” may have shifted over time.

While al-Qazwini’s thirteenth-century ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt focuses its descriptions on phenomena that were in no way crafted or touched by man, and were entirely natural, which is to say, divinely created, phenomena, contemporary and even earlier cosmographical texts, such as that of al-Tusi, do consider man-made objects, such as talismans, automata, and man-made wonders of engineering such as the nilometer. Later texts, especially those in the Persian tradition of the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt, began to include chapters and more material on architectural monuments, man-made talismans, and magic, or in other words, on artifice and phenomena shaped by humans. What originated as an account of the natural world and elements of the cosmos and celestial realms in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries had shifted by the later fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, when a proliferation of ʿajāʾib texts occurred amongst the scholarly classes of the Islamic world.¹⁹ This demonstrates that improvisation and addition of new material to the text of cosmological writings is to some degree encoded in the genre its inherent flexibility. Rather than describing it as an unstable genre, it would be more appropriate to understand it as a genre that invites invention, remediation, and pastiche from its very inception. Al-Qazwini’s work has demonstrated what has been called “intentional intertextual reworking”²⁰ from the very birth of the genre, a trend that will continue into nineteenth-century Urdu lithograph production of variations on this multiform text.

The nineteenth-century Urdu lithographs that adapt illustrations from the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt tradition seem to have their source in a very specific manuscript tradition. By the nineteenth century, a seventeetnth-century Bijapur courtly²¹ ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt manuscript,²² on which the illustrations in the later lithograph reproductions seem to have been based, was housed in the Lahore toshak-khana (treasure house). Charles Raikes (1812–1885) was an East India Company servant who in 1853 was appointed to a position in Lahore.²³ While there, he commissioned a fully illustrated exact manuscript copy of the Bijapur manuscript which he sent to the Imperial Exhibition of Paris in 1855 in the India pavilion as an example of “Muhammadan” craftsmanship, art, and science. This again suggests that the depiction of Islamic South Asian knowledge traditions was grounded in an Orientalist notion of the fantastical, as indicated in the discussion above regarding the reception of the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt tradition by Western scholars. From the Imperial Exhibition, it was sent to the India Office Library in London in 1865²⁴ and is now housed in the British Library. It does not seem that this manuscript circulated in South Asia after its initial creation. The manuscript from which it seems to have been copied, the Bijapuri ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt, remained in the Lahore toshak-khana until 1870, but also made its way to the collections of the British Library through the coercive methods of colonial collecting,²⁵ and it bears the inscription “H.M.E. bought this very valuable MS from the Lahore Toshakhana for 40 r[upees].” H.M.E. is Henry Miers Elliot (1808–1853), another British colonial official who was a scholar of Indian history and languages.²⁶ The British Museum purchased the manuscript from Elliot’s son in 1878.

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Figure 6.1

Inscriptions in ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt manuscripts from Lahore

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The cataloguing description for the 1854 ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt manuscript commissioned by Charles Raikes provides the additional detail that the copying of the manuscript was completed under the supervision of Mufti Ala al-Din of Lahore by Fadl al-Din b. Muhammad Bakhsh Sahhaf of Lahore on the 21st of September, 1854.²⁷ More research is required to ascertain the identity and role of this artist-craftsman (whose laqab (nickname) of “Sahhaf,” or bookbinder/maker of books also implies a family engagement with the manuscript trade), and how he and others who may have copied the original Bijapuri manuscript transmitted or reproduced their knowledge of the text and images for the Naval Kishore lithographic press roughly ten years later. Did they keep drafts of their copying work, or the pounces used to trace and transfer the illustrated images, from which they could, ostensibly, continue to make endless copies of the original manuscript? In fact, if one compares illustrations of Raikes’ commission of the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt produced in 1854, the Persian ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt produced in Lucknow 1866 on the Naval Kishore Press, and the later Urdu translation of the 1866 lithograph produced at Lucknow in 1877, it becomes clear that many of the illustrations exist in mirror image to other versions of the same work. This would suggest that artists were either copying each other or copying from pounces that allowed them to reproduce the manuscript illustrations, suggesting a strong continuity between Persianate manuscript and lithograph production in South Asia mediated by British colonial patronage in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Although much about the copying process is unclear, it seems that there is a connection between a colonial official commissioning a copy of the Bijapur courtly ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt from the Lahore toshak-khana, and then the appearance of faithful lithograph replicas of this manuscript on the book market ten years later. It is also possible that in the intervening years, with the social and economic upheaval of the 1857 revolution, when the Indian soldiers of the East India Company revolted causing a widespread rebellion against the British, the artists who made their living creating or reproducing fine manuscripts had to turn their hand to new industries and thus offered their services to the burgeoning field of lithographic printing. A scholar of South Asian Persianate lithograph and print culture, Zahra Shah, has demonstrated in her research that the producers and readers of Persian lithographs were notably itinerant across the north of the Indian subcontinent, carrying their knowledge and skills with them as they travelled.²⁸ The work of the scholar Amanda Lanzillo, who examines the history of craftsmanship and Persian scribal culture in South Asia, has also shown that artists who produced manuscripts in the second half of the nineteenth century also worked for lithographic presses and that “the two forms of book production co-existed, and scribes and calligraphers sometimes moved fluidly between manuscript and lithographic workshops.”²⁹ Furthermore, the extensive research of Ulrich Marzolph, who examines the history of Qajar lithographs and their illustrative programs, has demonstrated the continuity between manuscript and lithograph production after the introduction of lithography to Iran in the mid-nineteenth century. His studies of the prolific lithograph illustrator Ali Qoli³⁰ suggest that this artist was trained in the traditions of manuscript painting before turning his hand to creating illustrations for lithographs. What is most remarkable about this process is the role of the Orientalist fascination with the Islamic ʿajāʾib or “wonders” genre of manuscript, which led Charles Raikes to commission a copy of it for the 1855 Imperial Exhibition, a process which seems to have enabled craftsmen and artists to copy the text and illustrations, reproduce, adapt, and re-arrange them in the flourishing Lucknow lithograph industry. This, in turn, led to the mass production and dissemination of a visual program of miniature painting that had previously only been accessible to an elite who had access to courtly or scholarly manuscript collections.

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Figure 6.2

Images travelling from manuscript to lithograph

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4 The Talismans of Wonder Lithographs

The images from the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt manuscript commissioned by Raikes in Lahore, which were then reproduced in the 1866 lithograph produced in Lucknow, seem to have been copied and adapted into new genres in Urdu lithographs. The appearance of a full lithograph copy of the manuscript, with illustrations bearing near-identical composition and colour, was produced in Lucknow by the Naval Kishore Press in 1866. This suggests that the artisans who crafted the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt manuscript commissioned by Raikes for the 1855 Imperial Exhibition were involved in reproducing it in lithograph form. This initial reproduction was faithful to the original in terms of its text, which was reproduced in Persian, and the positioning of the illustrations in the text, and also imitated the original composition, style, and use of colour in the manuscript. However, with the passing of decades and the flourishing of the lithographic press in the major urban centres of India, it would appear that these illustrations began to take on a new life. They were adapted by printers and illustrators of new genres to create a pastiche of texts and images from a range of cosmographical, divinatory, and occult traditions, based on other lithographs, which were in turn copied from other manuscripts, whose modes of circulation of reproduction have yet to be identified.

The Urdu-language lithographic treatises that are most characteristic of this adaptation form a corpus of works all bearing the term tilism (“talisman”) in their title. The Tuhfah-yi Tilisimat (“Strange or Rare Talisman” or “Gift of the Talisman”), the Tilismat-i Ajaʾib (Talismans of Wonder) and the Tilism-i Ajaʾib (Talisman of Wonder) were all published in the third quarter of the nineteenth century in Delhi and Lucknow. These treatises are Urdu-language lithographed codices drawing on and re-interpreting the texts and visual tropes of the Persianate cosmographical manuscript tradition. Each of the three Tilism texts presents a different textual pastiche of occult science sub-genres, combining instructions on the making of magical talismans with dream interpretation tables that allow the reader to divine the future by interpreting oneiric imagery, with other genres of divination and wondrous storytelling. The Tilismat-i Ajaʾib is a lithograph printed in 1874 CE (1291 AH) by the publishing house Matbaʾ-yi Gulshan-i Muhammadi. The creators of the work are ʿAli Bahadur and Haji Sheikh Rajab ʿAli. This treatise is a standalone title that was bound into a larger volume with other works in related genres,³¹ dealing primarily with subject matter relating to divination and magic, such as the Tuhfah-yi ʿAmilin, (literally translated as the “Gift of the Magicians” or the “Wondrous Object of the Magicians”) which deals with the drawing of magic squares and astrology and astronomy. These texts were printed in the same time period, around 1873–1874, on a range of different presses (including Naval Kishore and the Matbaʾ-yi Haydar) across the large urban centres of the northern provinces of British India, suggesting that this subject matter was popular throughout this region. The Tilism-i Ajaʾib was printed by the Naval Kishore press³² and lacks a date. It was authored by Nadir Husayn, who also gives credit in his introduction to Lala Radha Lal for much of the content. It is distinguished in title from the work discussed above by the use of the singular (tilism) rather than plural (tilismat) of “talisman.” The visual content, in particular the illustrations and layout, of all three treatises is strikingly similar; they each feature between thirty and one hundred fantastical images, accompanied by limited captions that do not situate the images in a narrative structure, storyline, or a connected mythical geography.

This bouquet of nineteenth-century Urdu lithographed treatises with the term tilism in their title are characterized by a specific repertoire of images, arranged on the page in a similar fashion, though not in the same order, a selection of which seem to have been drawn from the 1866 Naval Kishore lithograph that was based on the Raikes ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt manuscript from Lahore. The Tilismat-i Ajaʾib in its introduction openly claims to have adopted images from the illustrations and text of the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt manuscript tradition. However, it is clear that the illustrators used a range of other sources as well, and their structure on the page may have been influenced by the genre described by Islamic art historians as a pictorial falnamah, and possibly—although this is purely speculative—from other forms of commercial print culture that may have been circulating at the time, such as illustrated European encyclopaedias, dictionaries, newspapers or even advertisements.

In the case of the “Tilism” lithographs, they structure the images on the page in a similar manner. The images are removed from their original text or narrative and situated in boxes, sometimes with a single large image on a page. More commonly, a page features two or more images, sometimes up to six images, of a range of wondrous creatures. Some images bear the names of common Persianate mythological creatures, such as the ʾanqa, simurgh, and the rakh, and many images also feature classical visual iconography taken from the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt genre, such as the angels Harut and Marut suspended upside down in the well of Babylon as a punishment for teaching humans magic, dog-headed people, dragons, and various types of hybrid snake creatures. There are also entirely new imaginative forms that seem to draw on the visual tropes of manuscript tradition but have been combined with innovative forms of visual practices by re-arranging the illustrations on the page in a new format and removing them from a geographical or cosmographical narrative structure. Each lithographed codex contains a wealth of imagery that defies easy classification, and the textual description accompanying the image is often superfluous, as it only provides a basic identification of the image that does not provide interpretation or meaning or situate the image in a narrative or structure, suggesting the emergence of a new visual pastiche of divinatory forms toward the end of the nineteenth century amongst lithograph printers in South Asia.

The re-mixing of the imagery from the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt into new layouts and visual schematics, removed from the narrative structure of a text, suggests not only the rise of new forms of print culture and visual culture, but also hints at new devotional and reading practices in spheres of Urdu readers in Lucknow and Delhi, where this genre of lithograph seems to have been popular. The creation of a visual pastiche and the practice of borrowing from earlier texts and weaving them into a new work certainly has strong precedents in Muslim intellectual and cultural practices in South Asia from the early modern period to the period at hand. However, the mass production of the lithograph and the absence of any need for a court atelier, or colonial patronage of artists, to print and circulate wondrous cosmographical images has implications for the relationship of readers to these texts and to the re-invention and proliferation of the supernatural beliefs and practices encoded in the Tilism corpus of lithographs. The spread of lithographic printing granted wide access to images that were previously the purview of the elite scholarly classes; this suggests that the introduction of printing to the public sphere in South Asia did not only bring about a disenchantment and a turn to reformism but conversely granted new life to occult practices and visual programs had limited circulation before the explosion of lithographic printing in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is possible to argue that Muslim modernity—or visual modernity at least—in South Asia is characterized by these images of the occult and the strange and wondrous that represent both a rupture with the past, in terms of their proliferation and remediation in a new lithographic format, and a continuity, in the sense that they adapt imagery extending back to a manuscript tradition that emerged in the Ilkhanid period.

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Figure 6.3

Adaptation of ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt illustrations to the Tilism-i Ajaʾib lithographs

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Figure 6.4

Another adaptation of ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt illustrations to the Tilism-i Ajaʾib lithographs

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While the three treatises examined here present similar illustrations and combinations of text, their prefaces differ somewhat in describing their contents and the authors’ intentions. These prefaces shed light on how the creators of these lithographic artifacts framed and explained their creations to their readership. The Tilismat-i Ajaʾib of the Gulshan-i Muhammadi press features the most detailed description of its contents, source texts, and the motivations of the authors for undertaking their practice of compiling and composing this newly formulated work. The preface opens with the offering of “unlimited thanks and endless praise to God the Provider, may his glory shine, as he is the worthy one who pronounces and brings into being the talisman [tilism]³³ of the world [jisne tilism-e jahanko lafz-kon³⁴], and arrays and embellishes [murattab aur arastah kar keh] the wonders [ajaʿibat] of the ever-shifting and deceptively entrancing world [buqalamun dunya].”³⁵ The authors’ choice of words is elaborate and poetic in keeping with the typically poetic and flowery language of Urdu-language lithographs introducing the topics of divination, and it provides some insight into his conceptualization of the interconnections between God, the human world, the cosmos, magic and divination—namely, that the connection between the movement of the stars and planets, the cosmos, and the reader’s practice of divination and magic are intimately tied together, and ultimately dependent on the power of the creator.

The author’s own account of the talisman’s interactions with this constellation of ideas and how the talisman can be used to bring imagined realities into being gives a sense of the role that these texts and illustrations played for their readership. The author’s choice of words in the preface suggests that it is God who is the ultimate talisman-maker, and that the world is itself a talisman, or an enchanted image, that the creator has constructed, which hints at the mysteries and wonders of the figural images (tilismat, also referred to as naqsh in the text, meaning painting, engraving, or diagram) that the reader will encounter in the treatise. The author’s choice of the unusual term būqalamūn to describe the human world refers to more than just the chameleon. The adjective describes any animal or object that changes colours and displays a shimmering, ever-shifting and entrancing polychromatic display. This word resonates within the linguistic heritage of Islamicate poetic culture across a range of lexicons from Arabic to Persian and Urdu, and the term in Persian is also applied to “a variety of objects or animals exhibiting changing colours, such as (silk) fabrics, the gemstone jasper, the chameleon, and the turkey.”³⁶

Būqalamūn was also used in Persian poetry as a metaphor for the enchanting and colourful display of spring that spread along the ground like a carpet as flowers and plants bloomed: the farsh-e būqalamūn, suggesting the transience of both spring and human life. In Arabic, the word refers to a type of silk cloth, which, as light plays on its surface, displays a range of different colours. The shifting and entrancing colours of the buqalamun cloth led to a further metaphor of “the unpredictable vicissitudes of times and changes of fortune, as an epithet for ʿālam (the world), ayyām (days, times), dahr (time, fate), sepehr (the celestial sphere, heavens),” while the weaver of the unpredictable būqalamūn cloth, the būqalamūnbāf, became a term for “fickle Fortune.”³⁷ In carefully selecting this poetic term with a depth and layering of meaning, the author of the preface calls to the reader’s mind the many dimensions of the talismanic image, its relationship to the vicissitudes of the stars and the cosmos, the multivalent qualities of visual representation for divining the future, and the ways in which the talismans and divinatory imagery may be used to manipulate the fickle world and its ever changing fortunes and seasons. At the same time, the poetic term calls to mind deceptive and entrancing enchantments, which the book also promises to deliver in its chapters.

Because the ʿajāʿibāt-e būqalamūn signifies the ever-shifting and beautiful (but also dangerous) time-space vagaries of the wonders of the world, this term also draws a connection to the wondrous cosmological images that will be presented in the text. More than a direct logical equivalence, the terms used in the preface create a poetic cluster of meanings, a family of associated semiotic layers, imagery, and metaphor that hint at the interconnection between the images of creation, cosmology, enchantment, and divination. This constellation of resonances evokes the purpose and meaning—and dangers—of the talismanic images that the reader observes in the text. After this poetic introduction of ideas, the preface of the Tilismat-i ʿAjāʾib proceeds to lay out its contents in detail. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of both talismans and other wondrous occasions or sights. These include details of the instructions for how to use talismans as recounted in ancient books, remarkable spectacles and accounts taken from the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, the memoirs of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (1569–1627) followed by a segue into how to create “thousands of rupees” from the miracles (karamat) of martyrs, suggesting that there was a practical and financial dimension to the supernatural teachings found within the covers of the lithograph.

The fifth chapter deals with the strange things and wonders (ʿajiba aur ghariba), narratives (naqliyat), stories (hikayat) and tales of adventure and trickery (charitra), followed by a sixth chapter on riddles, tricks, puzzles, and other forms of artifice (chistan, makr, paheli). The seventh chapter is about the images of the terrestrial and oceanic (barri aur bahri) wonders that have been created in the world by God, which the author specifies have been selected from the historical work, the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt.³⁸ The authors of this work openly admit that they have drawn on earlier and more ancient sources and reformulated them in a new assemblage of texts and images for this chapter. Situating the image-heavy sections that draw on cosmography amidst a selection of works that elaborate a set of practices including miracle-working (possible fraudulent, possibly not), the creation of talismans based on wisdom from ancient books, followed by riddles and wondrous creatures, suggests that these mass-produced lithographic works were intended to evoke equal amounts of devotional practices and piety as they were supernatural-themed entertainment and collective meaning-making amongst an audience who perhaps read the works aloud together. The poetic introduction suggests a certain performativity and affect that would lend itself to being read aloud for the edification and entertainment of a group of friends, or in a domestic setting.

The question remains of how these illustrated lithographs were used, how they were read or interpreted, and what meaning these sets of images carried for their audiences. It is possible that the sets of cosmographic images juxtaposed together outside of a narrative framework operated as pictorial falnamas or tools for divination by imagery, as a form of bibliomancy. Bibliomancy, or divination by book, depended on paintings, symbols and images, and not necessarily on the written word as such in order to arrive at an augury, although some illustrations did feature written auguries as well. Audiences who were not literate in the sense of having the capacity to process written texts, could have taken part in the reading, the act of meaning-making and interpretation, of the lithograph—perhaps in a domestic setting, or in groups, as the monumental size of the illustrations of the manuscript copies dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would suggest—by interpreting the images and using them to divine the future.

This tradition of pictorial divination based on cosmological imagery existed in manuscript form and has been studied extensively in the Islamic context by the scholars Serpil Bağcı and Massumeh Farhad. The intersection between cosmological writing and divination is evident in one of the earliest Arabic-language divination texts, thought to have been written by Abū Maʿshar (d. 886 CE), the famous astronomer-astrologer and natural philosopher.³⁹ It is titled the Kitāb al-Bulhān, or Book of Wonderment,⁴⁰ and an elaborately illustrated version of it was produced at the Jalayrid court during the reign of Sultan Ahmed Jalayir (1382–1410 CE). It is thought by scholars that the imagery featured in the Kitāb al-Bulhān was also used for prognostication, although the images were not accompanied by written auguries.⁴¹ The imagery featured in the manuscripts stemming from this tradition has almost certainly exercised an influence on the illustrations of the Urdu treatises examined here, although more research is necessary to understand the historical processes by which the images from this particular manuscript tradition reached Urdu lithograph illustrators.

In their extensive work on the illustrated falnamas produced at the Ottoman and Safavid courts, which draw on imagery of the Kitāb al-Bulhān and the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt, Farhad and Bağcı have observed that, much like the Urdu lithograph texts, while the elaborate cosmological images were identified, they were not situated in a narrative, and they argue that such “wondrous” images were used as “divination tools.”⁴² The manuscript tradition of pictorial falnamas often contained a prolific number of illustrations, between twenty-nine to fifty-nine images, while the text drew on oral traditions of fortune telling and divination, as well as performance traditions such as storytelling. The pictorial falnama functioned as a tool for divination, as each image represented an omen which could predict and influence the future through the realm of the unseen. The imagery in the falnama served the role of symbols that allowed the augur to see into the unknown, indicated by the text of the falnamas manuscript reference to their illustrations’ “signs” [nishan],⁴³ emphasizing their role as images that point to something else, not to themselves.

The methods of consulting pictorial divination manuscripts have been re-constructed from historical accounts of their use. Early modern accounts suggest that the diviner or fortune-teller interprets an image that the person seeking the augury has randomly selected. The interpretation would take the form of improvised verses that formed an augury. Through research into the social context and use of the pictorial divination manuscript, Bağcı and Farhad have also identified accounts of women fortune tellers in the early modern Islamic context plying their trade outside of mosques.⁴⁴ There also exist further eyewitness accounts in the early modern period of divination by pictorial augury. Here, the person seeking an augury would select an image at random from a set of images (much like pulling a tarot card from a deck), and the diviner would improvise a response based on the symbolism in the image, creating a form of ephemeral performance literature linked to notions of the unseen and unknowable, the contours of which can only be vaguely augured through divination. The primacy of image over text in creating meaning in the pictorial falnama is further emphasized in the Dresden falnama, which refers to bibliomancy as fal didan, or “seeing an augury,” rather than reading one. Farhad and Bağcı elaborate on the visual process of divination by image, describing the process of predicting the future through pictorial bibliomancy as bearing a similar function to “a talisman, a dream, or a planetary configuration,” and argue that the experience of seeking an augury through illustrated bibliomancy is mediated by the visual, and deriving meaning of the unseen (al-ghayb) through first seeing with the eyes and then allowing the meaning to emerge, rather than reading a text for meaning.⁴⁵ The formulation of sets of wondrous images in the pictorial falnama manuscript tradition bears a distinct similarity to the nineteenth-century Urdu treatises that feature fabulous images without an accompanying narrative or written augury. In these cases, it is assumed that a poetic augury was to be improvised on the spot, creating a form of subaltern ephemeral literary production suitable for those who did not necessarily record—or perhaps were not able to record—their poetic production in writing. While we can only imagine the auguries that women or non-elite literary actors could have formulated while contemplating the images in these manuscripts, the echo of the futures they might have divined remains in the illustrated pages of the text.

5 Conclusion

The process by which Charles Raikes, a British East India Company official, commissioned a copy of a courtly cosmographical manuscript that was later reproduced in lithograph, and whose illustrations were subtracted from the textual narrative and pieced together to be then adapted into what appeared to be an Urdu-language pictorial divination lithograph, provides a glimpse into the process by which elite manuscript production and visual tropes were translated into popular visual culture through print technology and its accompanying material support, such as the circulation of pounces, traces, copies of manuscripts and lithographs, as well as the circulation of itinerant craftsmen who practiced these technologies that combined older methods, such as hand-painting, with new types of production, such as lithography. The imagery was adapted to entirely different purposes during its journey from elite to mass production. The hegemony of elite production and interpretation was turned on its head by the ephemeral practices of divination for which these images were perhaps being used by the time they found themselves re-arranged and re-interpreted in Urdu pictorial falnamas.

The shift from manuscript to lithograph production in the context of divination texts does not represent a journey of pure continuity or pure rupture, as it allows the preservation of elite Islamicate forms of intellectual production, as Zahra Shah has demonstrated in her research on Imam Bakhsh Sahbai,⁴⁶ sociality, the creation and re-formulation of the use of illustrated texts, and the possible emergence of new forms of sociality and devotional practices centred around books that seem to be aimed at a far larger audience than the manuscript culture from which they derive much of their inspiration and materials. The mass production of texts that remediated premodern Islamicate enchanted notions of the supernatural through the introduction of “colonial” printing technology certainly challenges our notion that print in the Indian subcontinent, within the context of Islamic intellectual discourse, largely served a program of sober, disenchanted, and rationalistic reformism. The work of SherAli Tareen has convincingly argued that even Islamic reformists were not removed from enchantment, and in fact that “enchanted” methods and means of argument, such as miracles, were central to reformist groups such as the Deobandis and Barelvis’ competitions for religious legitimacy.⁴⁷ So, while the notion of disenchanted modernizing Islamic reformists is itself not an accurate one, it can nonetheless be argued that authors of a thoroughly enchanted Islamicate worldview, enmeshed in the supernatural and encouraging devotional practices anchored in belied in the unseen realm, in fact took advantage of the new technology of lithography to proliferate ‘enchantment’ more widely, while the genre underwent a process of remediation, a repurposing and re-configuring to give rise to new meanings and ways of reading.⁴⁸

Furthermore, the role of colonial patronage of manuscript production and craftsmanship in South Asia confuses the trajectory of this form of lithograph production further, as it seems that the perpetuation of an “emic” narrative of an enchanted Islamicate cosmology grounded in supernatural beliefs and divinatory devotional practices may in fact be the result of the inordinate focus of British colonial officials on manuscripts that promoted a vision of South Asian Muslims as embodying a fantastical place in the Orientalist imaginary. Interestingly, it is this patronage, in addition to the introduction of lithograph technologies, that seem to have contributed to the wide dissemination of new illustrated pastiche genres of text that lie somewhere between cosmology and divination treatise. At the same time, this colonial intervention may have led to the mass production in print of the images stemming from cosmological manuscripts such as the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt.

The exposure and circulation of these lithographed images to a larger reading (or viewing) public meant an expansion of the imaginary of what the cosmos was for the Muslim readership, and what the imagery could be used for—from talisman-making, to reciting improvised poetic auguries, based on pictorial divination, to wondrous story-telling based on fantastical imagery. In the social context of the collective reading circle in a domestic sphere, or the more public act of telling of fortunes outside of a shrine or a mosque, it is possible the lithographed Urdu divination and cosmographic texts created new forms of reading-together and social connectedness, new avenues of ephemeral poetic performance of auguries that transcended the limits of literacy and access to manuscript texts, as well as forming a connection between the readership/audience and the unseen, be it the ghayb of the future and nearly unattainable divine meaning, or the unseen celestial realms where angels and time dwell. The adaptation, remediation, and pastiche-ization of a cosmological work such as the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt and the adaptation of its imagery from manuscript to lithograph, in combination with a range of other genres of text and image drawing on the occult sciences of oneiromancy, talisman-making and other practices, represents to some degree the reformulation and wide dissemination of an enchanted worldview and set of devotional practices grounded in a wondrous cosmography, a poetic set of associations regarding the vicissitudes of time, fate, and the stars, and ephemeral improvisational auguries that challenge scholarly notions of how print technologies shaped Muslim modernity and religious practice in South Asia.