Javahir al-Musiqat-i Muhammadi

The Javahir al-Musiqat is a manuscript on music and dance in the British Library (Or. 12857), which Mark Zebrowski thinks may date from the reign of Ali Adil Shah I of Bijapur, about 1570. Fragmentary, it ends abruptly at folio 214 and has forty-eight paintings in a crude but lively version of the Nujum style. The text is in Deccani Urdu in a clumsy nasta'liq, written with a thick brush on coarse brown paper. ¹

The two share a palette — bright orange, moss-green, brownish red and brilliant royal blue — common in later Bijapuri painting, and its third section of single women (dancers?) in arched niches resembles the Nujum's fourth. A perplexing note on folio 4a names Muhammad Adil Shah (1627–56) as patron; the author thinks it was added later, when the book entered the royal library. ^{1 2}