Muntakhab al-tawarikh 316.1.1

316.1.1

In many separate branches of knowledge, such as poetry, the composition of enigmas, prosody, rhyme, history, philology, medicine, and the interpretation of the Qur’an he was without a rival, and was well versed in all these. In poetry he was widely renowned, and he was the author of a *divan* and of other works. He took to translating Hindu books, and put into Persian verse the book entitled *Lilawati*, which is a work of great renown on the art of reckoning, geometry, and arithmetic, and composed a poem on the story of Nal and Daman, which is celebrated among the Hindus. His style in this poem is quite different from that of the former masters of this kind of poetry. He wrote it in the *haza-j-i-musaddas-i-akhram-i-ashtar-i-maqbuz* metre, after the manner of Nizami’s *Makhzan-ul-Asrar*, comprising more or less four thousand couplets, and it is in truth a *masnavi* the like of which has not been written in India for the last three hundred years. He brought this book to an end in the course of five months, and presented it to the emperor in the thirty-ninth year of his reign, as will be related in its proper place.