Book and Library Culture in the Delhi Sultanate: A Historical Study

Author

Reeba Shamim Malik, Dr. Nazakat Hussain, Anuj Bali


Abstract

 This article examines book and library culture in the Delhi Sultanate from the early thirteenth century to the early sixteenth century. Historians have described the politics and armies of the Sultanate in detail, but the making, keeping, and teaching of books has usually been treated as a thin preface to the Mughal Imperial workshop. The study reads Persian court chronicles, the public works memoir of Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq, Arabic notices of Delhi, Sufi biographical compilations, and the surviving college buildings and manuscripts, and places them beside recent scholarship on sultanate book art and Persianate literary culture. The evidence shows a real book culture, dispersed across the royal court, the madrasa, the Sufi hospice, and private scholarly households, rather than gathered in one catalogued royal library of the later Mughal kind. Paper was being made in Delhi by the thirteenth century, while palm leaf remained in use for many Sanskrit and Jain books. Arabic served law and scripture, Persian served history and court poetry, and Hindavi served devotional and romance writing. Firuz Shah rebuilt older colleges, endowed teaching houses, and sponsored compilation and translation, including versions of Sanskrit books taken from the temple library at Nagarkot. The sack of Delhi in the year thirteen ninety eight broke this concentration, and book production then grew more visibly in the provincial sultanates. The article argues that sultanate book culture should be judged by its institutions, languages, and scripts, not by the absence of a Mughal style library archive.



Keywords

Delhi Sultanate, madrasa libraries, Persian manuscripts, paper and calligraphy, Hindavi book culture



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References


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