The Victoria and Albert Akbarnāma or First Akbar-nāma is the first illustrated manuscript of the Akbarnama, the history of the Mughal ruler Akbar and his ancestors from the pen of Abul Fazl. It is also the oldest copy of the Akbar-nāma, which was written at almost the same time as this history.
Even before Abul Fazl had completed his text, the already drafted chapters were copied by a calligrapher and illustrated in the royal studios. This haste meant that massive changes had to be made to the already illustrated manuscript following a revision of the work by the author. In order to be able to continue using the elaborately produced illuminations in the revised text version, text panels within the pictures and on their reverse sides had to be pasted over with the new wording. As a result, the illustrated pages of the manuscript in particular are unusually thick.
The first volume of this Akbar-nāma is in the Golestan Palace in Tehran. The second volume, with 116 images depicting events during the period between 1560 and 1577, is now kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum under the inventory number I.S. 2-1896 1-117. About 20 detached illustrations are also distributed among various museums and collections worldwide.
There is no consensus among experts as to the exact dating of the illustrations. Due to their stylistic proximity to an illustrated history of Timur, the Tīmūr-nāma (–1586), some place them in the period from 1586 to 1587, while others, due to the known time of composition of the Akbar-nāma, assume a period of origin from 1590 to 1595.
History of the manuscript The manuscript has no colophon. However, on the lower margin of folio 84/117 (image no. 169, verso) there is an informal note which reads: "completed at the command of ...(illegible)... in the month Day of the year 40". This refers to the 40th year of Akbar's reign, resulting in a date between December 10, 1595 and January 9, 1596.Seyller: „Codicological Aspects of the Victoria and Albert Museum Akbarnāma." 1990, p. 383. The text and images of the Victoria-and-Albert-Akbar-nāma only cover the period from 1560 to 1577.Stronge: Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, p. 48. In addition to this small inscription, several seals and handwritten annotations on the recto of the first folioDas Erste Akbar-nāma beginnt auf dem Verso von Folio IS. 2:1-1896 (1/117). The reading direction in Persian is from right to left. Notes on the further whereabouts of the manuscript: Jahangir confirms in an autograph that he took over the work shortly after his accession to the throne and classifies this Akbar-nāma as a particularly valuable manuscript of "first class second degree".Seyller: „The Inspection and Valuation of Manuscripts in the Imperial Mughal Library." 1997, p. 274.Stronge: Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, p. 55. Next, Aurangzeb had his seal affixed to the volume in 1668/69, after which the work disappeared from the imperial library at an unspecified date. Seals from 1766 and 1794 identify the Nawab of Rampur as the new owner.Vgl. Seyller: „The Inspection and Valuation of Manuscripts in the Imperial Mughal Library." 1997, p. 295. The further fate of the book can only be vaguely traced. Since the first volume of the Victoria-and-Albert-Akbar-nāma is in the Golestan Palace,This part of the manuscript bears the inventory number 2253 and comprises 666 pages, in which only twelve illustrations remain. Cf. Mohammad Ali Rajabi: Masterpieces of Persian Painting. Exhibition held at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in spring 2005. Institute for Promotion of Visual Arts in association with the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts. Tehran 2011². ISBN 978-600-91382-2-7. S. 396–399. John Seyller, Basawan, in: Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer, B.N. Goswamy (Hrsg.): Masters of Indian Painting. 1100–1650. Artibus Asiae Publishers, (Supplementum 48 I) Zürich 2011. p. 128. ISBN 978-390707750-4. suggests that this volume arrived in Iran at some point after 1669. The second volume remained in India until it was discovered by Major General Clarke, who was a senior administrative officer in the province of Awadh from 1858 to 1862. His widow finally sold the manuscript to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1896. The museum initially assumed that it was an illustrated Āʾīn-i Akbarī. It was only when Henry Beveridge visited the museum in 1905 that he identified the manuscript as an Akbar-nāma.Stronge: Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, p. 36.
The outer shape The fragmentary manuscript in the Victoria and Albert Museum comprises 273 folios with 116 illustrations and an illuminated frontispiece. Die Seiten haben eine Größe von 37,4 × 24,7 cm, die Textfelder mit 25 Zeilen, beschrieben in Nastaʿlīq, messen 24 × 13,4 cm.Seyller: „The Inspection and Valuation of Manuscripts in the Imperial Mughal Library." 1997, p. 295. The size of the folios is always an average value; the individual folios are not always exactly the same size. For this reason, different values can be found in the literature. Beach:The Imperial Image. 2012, p. 196 Fußnote 10 gibt als Seitengröße ca. 38,1 × 22,4 cm an. The pictures are on average about 32.5 × 19.5 cm in size.Stronge gives the exact image sizes for all illustrations, which are measured without borders and frames. See Stronge:Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, p. 187. At the time of its acquisition by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the manuscript had already partially disintegrated into its individual folios, which were loosely stored between two varnished book covers in a box. The 116 illustrations have been individually framed so that they can be exhibited.
A special feature of the manuscript are the unusually thick image pages and strangely designed text fields on the illustrations. During an examination of the manuscript, John Seyller discovered that these peculiarities are the result of subsequent changes to the text. In order to be able to use the painstakingly produced images for a different text, the backs were covered over with a complete page of text and the text fields in the illustrations were pasted over with new, matching text panels. In some cases, the old wording was also painted over or made unrecognizable in some other way, for example in image 101. Folios that only had writing on the front and back were simply replaced with newly written sheets. The changes can be seen not only in the different colors of the original paper and the paper used later, but also in the sometimes oversized, sometimes crookedly pasted new text panels (for example, image nos. 110, 115, 116) as well as the handwriting of another, earlier calligrapher, which is still visible in a few places.Seyller: „Codicological Aspects of the Victoria and Albert Museum Akbarnāma." 1990, p. 380–381. Stronge: Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, p. 84.
The new wording required different catchwords on the image pages. Often the scribe simply wrote the current custode next to the earlier one. Sometimes a custode appears on both the front and back of an illustrated folio - an indication that the page was turned over when the book was redesigned, i.e. transformed from a recto into a verso or vice versa.Seyller: „Codicological Aspects of the Victoria and Albert Museum Akbarnāma." 1990, S. 381.
Finally, the new text had to be fitted in so that the narrative met the corresponding illustration at the right point. To achieve this, the calligrapher sometimes artificially slowed down the pace of the narrative by setting the lines at an angle.
The dating of the illustrations Abu 'l-Fazl was first commissioned to write the history of Akbar's reign in 1589 and handed over the first part of the text, which covers the period up to 1572, in April 1596. Two years later, the continuation of the work up to 1598 was completed. The Victoria and Albert Museum assigns the illustrations in this manuscript to the period ca. 1592-1594.Diese Angabe findet sich unter „more information" zu den einzelnen Illustrationen der Handschrift, zum Beispiel bei Bild Nr. IS.2:93-1896; Stronge: Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, S. 84. However, the question of when it was created is controversial.
Roughly speaking, there are two different chronological classifications: one group of experts dates the paintings to around 1590-1595Stronge, Leach, Losty, Rice – Stronge: Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, S. 45. Leach: „Pages from an Akbarnama." In: Crill, Stronge und Topsfield (Hrsg.): Arts of Mughal India. Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton. 2004, S. 43 und Fußnote 5 S. 53–54. Losty und Roy: Mughal India. Art, Culture and Empire. 2012, S. 28 und S. 46. Yael Rice, „One Flower from each Garden." In: Larry Silver und Kevin Terraciano: Canons and Values. Ancient to Modern. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 2019, S. 138–162, s.p. 155. another to 1586-1587.Seyller, Beach, Brand und Pal: Seyller: „Codicological Aspects of the Victoria and Albert Museum Akbarnāma." 1990, S. 384; Beach: The Imperial Image. Paintings for the Mughal Court. 2012, S. 69; Michael Brand, „Miskin", in Milo Beach, Eberhard Fischer und B.N. Goswamy (Hrsg.): Masters of Indian Painting 100–1650. Artibus Asiae Publishers, Zürich 2011. Artibus Asiae Supplementum 48/I. S. 167–186, s.S. 168, No. 6–9. Pratapaditya Pal: Indian Painting. A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1993, s.p 203. ISBN 0-8109-3465-5. The latter agrees with Seyller's assessment. He had been able to prove that the illustrations are older than the accompanying text and concluded from this that the pictures belong to an earlier, unknown Akbar story - a thesis that Milo Beach, a former director of the Freer Gallery of Art, had already put forward in 1981.Beach: The Imperial Image. 1981, p. 83. The dating of the illustrations can therefore be carried out independently of the composition of the Akbar-nāma according to purely stylistic aspects. After a detailed consideration of the artistic characteristics, he places the miniatures between the Tārīkh-i khāndān-i Tīmūriyya of 1584/86 and the Rāmāyana of 1589, whereby he considers a creation in the years 1586/87 to be probable.Seyller: „Codicological Aspects of the Victoria and Albert Museum Akbarnāma." 1990, p. 384.
Susan Stronge, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, disagrees with Seyller's statements. In her research, she has come to the conclusion that the text for which the images were originally produced is merely one of the older versions of Abū 'l-Fazl's work. However, the current text does not yet correspond to the known edition of Akbar-nāma. The most striking differences are the abrupt beginning of the text in 1560, which does not correspond to any of the known volume divisions, the lack of a long epilogue after the end of the first thirty years of Akbar's life and the similarly missing introduction to the next volume.Stronge: Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, p. 45.
Abu 'l-Fazl revised his text several times. According to the contemporary history work Tabaqāt-i Akbarī, one of the early versions was already in circulation in 1592/93. According to Stronge, work on an illustrated Akbar-nāma manuscript could therefore have begun as early as 1592 or even 1590. In any case, the pictures were made for an Akbar-nāma. And since this was not commissioned until 1589, it is impossible that the accompanying illustrations were created as early as 1586/87, as suggested by Seyller.Stronge: Painting for the Mughal Emperor. 2002, p. 45 and p. 84. She therefore does not address Seyller's stylistic-historical arguments.
Role models in the Tārīḫ-i ḫandān-i Tīmūriyya