The Mandu Bustan of Sa'di (ca. 1500-1503), National Museum, New Delhi

This illustrated copy of the Bustan (The Orchard) of Sa'di of Shiraz (ca. 1200-1290), of 229 folios and 43 miniatures, is in the National Museum, New Delhi (48.6/4), and was made at Mandu, capital of the sultanate of Malwa, around 1500-1503. ¹ The catalogue recalls that Sa'di's moral tales amused and enlightened readers throughout Islam and that several copies of his Gulistan and Bustan were brilliantly illustrated in India. ¹

It was written in an unusually bold but graceful nasta'liq by Shahsuvar al-Katib for Nasir al-Din Khalji of Malwa (r. 1500-1511), the second patron of the Ni'matnama; the sultan's name and titles are in a shamsa on folio 1r. ¹ The colophon page carries an inspection date of AH 908 (1502-3), so it must have been finished early in his reign. ¹ Inscriptions on folios 1 and 190r name the painter and illuminator as Haji Mahmud, who illustrated the Ni'matnama at Mandu; the other forty-one pictures appear to come from the same workshop if not the same hand. ¹

One picture shows the tale of the hospitable patriarch Abraham, who invited a frail old wanderer to dine; noticing his silence at grace, he realised the guest was a Zoroastrian and drove him back into the desert hungry, whereupon an angel rebuked him: for a century God had fed this man, and now he presumed to withhold his hand. ¹

The stumpy trees on the horizon, the logical handling of space and architecture, the ornament and the figure types show a faint but recognisable awareness of Bihzad, the late Timurid master of Herat. ¹ Since the Mandu patrons and artists are unlikely to have seen his paintings, his style must have reached them at second or third hand, which Welch takes as a tribute both to Bihzad's power and to the level of artistic appreciation at Mandu. ¹