A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s1.42

c20.s1.42

The libraries thus formed were maintained and increased by Jahāngīr, Shahjahān, and Aurangzēb (1605–1707); and even the weak successors of the last Great Mogul were not indifferent to the delights of choice books and dainty pictures.¹ But the political convulsions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries destroyed the imperial libraries, with most of the similar collections formed by subordinate potentates like the Rohilla chief and the Nawāb-Vazīr of Oudh.² Fragments of these wonderful accumulations are now scattered over the world in private and public collections, and although constituting but a small fraction of the great mass once in existence, supply ample material for the history of Indo-Persian calligraphy and the sister art of the miniaturist. In a book like the present, covering a wide range of topics and a space of more than two thousand years, it is impossible to go into minute details about individual manuscripts, but I cannot refrain from noticing briefly the most pathetic bit of wreckage from a princely library which has come under my observation.