Kitab-i-Nauras

Late in the sixteenth century, Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur composed the verses that comprise the Kitab-i-Nauras, the Book of Nine Rasas. The fifty-nine songs and seventeen couplets of the book are written in Dakhni Urdu and indicate the ragas in which they were to be sung. Ibrahim was deeply devoted to music and was himself a dhrupad-singer and the player of a stringed lute-like instrument called tambur.

The Kitab has excited the attention of historians for the light that it throws on Ibrahim’s personality and the deeply multicultural ethos of his court. The first verse of the Kitab is an invocation to Saraswati, and the second verse invokes Prophet Muhammad and the Sufi saint Gesu Daraz. Subsequent verses extol the quest for knowledge as the most important pursuit in life. Several verses explore traditions of love-poetry, finding similes and metaphors to describe the beloved; others speak of the beauty of music or describe ragas as personifications.

There are also verses in praise of the Sultan’s own wife Chand Sultan, mother Bari Sahib, favourite elephant Atash Khan, and his tambur, which he had named Moti Khan. There are several verses in praise of Shiva and
more than once Ibrahim speaks of Ganesha and Saraswati as his spiritual mother and father.

The Kitab-i-Nauras is known from some ten manuscripts in different libraries that were copied between 1582 and 1618. Most of these are powerfully calligraphed but are not elaborately illuminated. However, sources speak of one lavish manuscript that was written out by the royal calligrapher Khalilullah. So pleased was Ibrahim with Khalilullah’s version of the Kitab, that he dubbed him badshah-i-qalam (“king of the pen”) and made him sit on the throne as a reward.

Scholars have recently established that six folios of a Kitab-i-Nauras in the National Museum, along with another known folio in a private collection, are part of this important and hitherto undiscovered manuscript calligraphed by Khalilullah. Smaller in size than most other versions of the Kitab, each pages has nine lines of calligraphy written in a neat Nasta’liq. Between the lines of writing, we see superb examples of the illuminator’s art: the text is enclosed in cloud-bands and the spaces in between are filled with a virtual forest executed in delicate ink drawing on gold. Several distinct species of plants and animals can be distinguished in these miniscule drawings. Cleverly, the illuminator treats the cloud-bands around the text as though they were landscape elements; birds strut on them or swim among them, and trees sprout from the tussocks above the words.