Corpus of Arabic & Persian Inscriptions of Bihar- A.H. 640-1200 (An Old and Rare Book)

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The K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, Patna, undertook, towards the end of 1961, a scheme for the collection and publication of the texts of all the available Arabic and Persian inscriptions of Bihar. I was a Research Fellow in the Institute, and the work was allotted to me. The preliminary work of collecting the estampages of inscriptions took long as it was done in the course of tours undertaken at different times and often at long intervals. Soon after the estampages were photographed and the texts partly edited, my services were transferred to the Post-graduate Department of History, Patna University. The matter would perhaps have ended there, but Dr. S. H. Askari, the then Honorary Joint Director of the Institute, desired that I should complete the work. However, my preoccupation with my new assignment forced me to put aside the work for some time. I am happy that I was able to complete the work and hand over the press-copy to the Institute during the tenure of Dr. Askari as the Honorary Joint Director.

The physical difficulties and obstacles facing a worker in this field are many and varied. I mention them briefly here not to seek any personal credit, but to draw the attention of the authorities concerned to the precarious and neglected condition of some of the inscriptions and the urgent need of removing them to the Patna Museum for proper preservation. Several inscriptions are in isolated, out-of-way, places. They are fixed at great heights (nos. 80, 85-7, 91); ladders are difficult to be had at some of these places and quite often more than one ladder is required to pass on the paper, pads, etc., to the man preparing the rubbing, who has to remain perched for a long time at a great height with insufficient support. Some of these inscriptions are insecurely held in the masonry and may fall down and break; in fact this has already happened in the case of no. 91.

Inscriptions are, in a way, the footprints of the preceding generations on the sands of Time. The wind of change has played havoc with these imprints and has obliterated many of them. It is our duty, and in our interest, to protect and preserve the few which have survived, because they often are our only dependable guides in the less-frequented bye-lanes of history.

Much useful and pioneering work in the field of epigraphic studies was done by H. Blochmann. His articles on the history and geography of medieval Bengal, in which he published and edited the texts of many unnoticed inscriptions and coins, will always remain a valuable source of information to students of the regional history of Bengal and Bihar. Blochmann's work is primarily concerned with the pre-Mughal history of Bengal, but he also edited and published some of the earliest inscriptions belonging to Bihar. The real pioneering work in the medieval epigraphy of Bihar has been done by Dr. S. H. Askari. On the basis of epigraphic sources, he first surveyed in a paper the history of Bihar in the Turko- Afghan period. Unlike Blochmann, to whom many of the inscriptions were sent by workers in the field and local officers, Dr. Askari combines in himself the roles of the explorer and the scholar. During the course of his extensive tours in the interior of the State he has discovered and brought to light numerous inscriptions and published their texts, though mostly without plates. In recent years, under the supervision of Dr. Z. A. Desai, Superintending Epigraphist for Arabic and Persian Inscriptions, a large number of inscriptions of Bihar have been listed in the volumes of the Annual Report, Indian Epigraphy. Dr. Desai and some of his colleagues such as Y. K. Bukhari, A. A. Kadiri and W. H. Siddiqi have also edited a number of pre-Mughal inscriptions of Bihar in some of the recent volumes of Epigraphia Indica Arabic and Persian Supplement. In regard to the inscriptions of the Mughal period, however, hardly any systematic work has been done so far. Some forty years ago Syed Muhammad did valuable, preparatory, work by collecting and publishing the texts of inscriptions set in the various buildings in the town of Patna. But since he did not publish the plates, the veracity of his readings could not be checked. It now appears that some of these were defective and wrong.