The Illustration of Mīrkhwānd's Rauḍat al-ṣafā, RAS Ms. P. 38

Among the precious manuscripts belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society is a copy of volume four of the Tārīkh-i Rauḍat al-ṣafā (History of the Garden of Purity), a work of ‘universal history’ in six volumes, compiled by Muḥammad b. Khwāndshāh b. Maḥmūd (d. 903/1498), generally known as Mīrkhwānd. He composed his chronicle in Herat under the patronage of ‘Alī Shīr Navā’ī (d. 906/1501), the Naqshbandi Sufi, Chaghatay poet and statesman at the court of the last Timurid ruler, Sulṭān-Ḥusain-i Bāyqarā (r. 875-912/1469-1506), see Fig. 1.

A Note on Sufi Snakes and Ladders

Among the diverse treasures of the Royal Asiatic Society are two early nineteenth century paper playing boards for the north Indian game of gyān caupar̩, the ‘Chaupar of Knowledge (Gnosis)’. This once popular game, played with dice or cowry shells, leads its players gradually up the board from hellish states or earthly vices to higher virtues and ultimately to heaven or liberation. It is known in various Jain and Hindu (mainly Vaiṣṇava) versions of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and a small handful of nineteenth century Muslim (or Sufi) examples. By the 1890s it also gave rise, in a simplified and denatured form, to the English children's game of Snakes and Ladders. One of the Society's boards is an ingenious 124-square version of the Vaiṣṇava form of gyān caupar̩, unique in its design and philosophical conception, whose inventor has been identified as the Brahmin scholar Thiruvenkatacharya Shastri. The Society's other board is a rare example of the 100-square Muslim form of gyān caupar̩ (Fig. 1), inscribed with Persian and Arabic square names that are loosely based around Sufi terms for the stages of the mystical path. I am here concerned with this form of the game and in particular with an expanded variant form of it that has recently come to light.

Teaching and Research in Colonial Bombay

Bombay did not play the kind of administrative nodal role that first Madras and later Calcutta did in terms of overarching governance in the Indian subcontinent, occupying instead a pivotal position for the region’s commerce and industry. Nonetheless, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Bombay were a formative age for education and research in science, as in the other Presidencies. A colonial government, a large native population enrolled in the new European-style educational system, and the rise of several institutions of instruction and learning, fostered an environment of scientific curiosity. The Asiatic Society of Bombay (1804), which was initially the hub of research in all disciplines, became increasingly antiquarian and ethnographic through the course of the nineteenth century. The Victoria and Albert Museum (conceived in 1862 and built by 1871 and opened to the public in 1872), was established to carry out research on the industrial arts of the region, taking for its original collections fine and decorative arts that highlight practices and crafts of various communities in the Bombay Presidency. The University of Bombay (1857) was primarily tasked with teaching, and it was left to other establishments to conduct research. Key institutions in this regard included the Bombay Natural History Society (1883) given to local studies of plants and animals, and the Haffkine Institute (1899), which examined the role of plague that had been a dominant feature of the social cityscape from 1896. The Royal Institute of Science (1920) marked a point of departure, as it was conceived as a teaching institution but its lavish funding demanded a research agenda, especially at the post-graduate level. The Prince of Wales Museum (1922) would prove to be seminal in matters of collection and display of objects for the purpose of research. All of these institutions would shape the intellectual debates in the city concerning higher education. Typically founded by European colonial officials, they would increasingly be administered and staffed by Indians.

The Orchid Flora of Gunung Ledang (Mount Ophir), Malaysia - 120 Years after Ridley

A comprehensive assessment on the orchid flora of Gunung Ledang, Johor, Malaysia was carried out from 2012 to 2018 with the aim to re-evaluate the presence of orchid species listed by Ridley in his “Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 35:1–28”, published in 1901, after more than 100 years. The relevant account for comparison is also listed, noting that Ridley’s historical collections were for the isolated group of hills commonly known as Gunung Ledang (Mount Ophir), while the collated item in Orchidaceae is part of catalogues for the whole of Peninsular Malaysia. After Ridley, no account on the orchid flora of Gunung Ledang has been properly given, particularly from the uppermost peak of the mountain, where many interesting plants and orchids are to be found there. This study identified 26 species or 67% were the same as those recorded by Ridley (1901), and 65 species or 83% of Turner (1995) checklist of 270 species of orchids for the state of Malacca and Johor, including the common and widespread species to Peninsular Malaysia. By contribution, this paper provides an updated account on the diversity of orchids in Gunung Ledang, listing 122 species of orchids, of which eight are endemic to Peninsular Malaysia, two are hyper-endemic known only from Gunung Ledang, and 30 were recognised as new records. A comparison table of the current findings against Ridley (1901) and Turner (1995) is provided which shows only 16 species were the same in all three studies.

Edward William West and the Pahlavi codex MK

This article discusses some manuscripts copied and described by E. W. West in his Notebooks held at the Royal Asiatic Society, with special reference to the texts contained in the Pahlavi codex MK.