SULTANATE INDIA, PROBABLY 15TH CENTURY

A folio from the same monumental Qur'an from which these folios come is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (acc.no. 1977.374). In terms of its mise en page and script it is very similar to a folio in the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (acc.no. AI 84-19), which Eloïse Brac de la Perrière uses in her seminal article on bihari calligraphy to illustrate the classic features of this group of manuscripts (Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, "Manuscripts in bihari calligraphy: Preliminary remarks on a little-known corpus", Muqarnas 33, 2016, pp.63-90). Almost all of them have between 11 and 15 lines per page, and a similar jagged script. Within the corpus, these pages belong to what she terms the 'Classical' group, which like ours have double or triple rules around the text panel: this creates an inner margin and an outer margin, which are used for variant readings of the mushaf presented in Bihari script and an outer margin with additional notes set diagonally in a script familiar from Bengali chancery documents. The classical group have similar illumination, with bold medallions and a bright orange used heavily throughout. Similarities between them lead Brac de la Perrière to suggest that all examples were made in a short period of time, possibly in a single workshop (op.cit., p.69). A group of thirty-five leaves from this Qur’an recently sold at Sotheby's London, 26 April 2023, lot 25.