Literary Heritage of the Rulers of Amber and Jaipur

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Introduction

The collection of manuscripts in the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum constitutes the mm t important assets of the Museum. This varied and extensive collection. meticulously built up by the learned and connoisseur Maharajas over a long period of time, needs to be studied thoroughly by scholars for a proper understanding of the literary heritage of the illustrious house of the Kachhawahas of Amber and Jaipur. The manuscripts eover a wide range of subjects : vedas, puranas, religion, philosophy, poetics, aesthetics, grammar, dramatics, astronomy, astrology, medicine, history, biography, erotics, etc. written in many languages and scripts. Many of these are illuminated or illustrated with fine miniatures of various styles and schools. Some of these have wooden covers containing colourful paintings, some are written on palm-leaves or on sanchipat barks, some on hand-made papers of different colours. As a whole the collection may be regarded a true representative of the rich tradition of learning and book production of mediaeval India.

The manuscripts are distributed in several collections which need to be explained in brief: (i) the Khasmohor collection, which actually formed the personal library of the Maharajas, (ii) the Pothikhana collection which contained the volumes written or copied by the Pothikhana staff along with the volumes preserved there. (iii) the Pundarik collection which was built up by the family of Ratnakar Pundarik, the noted scholar and bibliophile who was the preceptor of Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh and (iv) the Museum collection, which were kept on display in the Museum from long before the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum was formally opened to public in 1959. The last group has already been catalogued whereas the first group, which is the most important, wide-ranging and rich, has now been indexed and published in this volume.

Sri Gopal Narayan Bahura is eminently suitable to prepare the authorwise and titlewise index of this important collection of manuscripts as he comes of an orthodox and learned Brahmin family which has served in many key positions in the erstwhile Jaipur State for eight generations. He himself started his career in the Pothikhana where he handled these volumes, went through their contents, listed and classified them before he moved to the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Jodhpur from where he retired in 1967 as Deputy Director. He was, at once, recruited by the late Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II for preparing an exhaustive descriptive list of all the volumes preserved in different collections of the Pothikhana as he was aware of the richness and variety of the collection which he wanted to be known and utilised by competent scholars and researchers. Sri Bahura had to work almost single-handedly amidst various difficulties and unexpected problems. That he has finally succeeded in preparing a register of manuscripts containing nearly eight thousand volumes by going through the thousands and thousands of' folios, and subsequently a title wise and author wise index to it, shows the devotion and zeal with which he worked for all these years in spite of illness and old age. It would have been proper for us to publish the registers containing catalogued entries of all the titles but we had to settle for the publication of the index as we could hardly wait for such an ambitious project which would have taken a much longer time.

The introductory essay on the literary heritage of the Maharajas of Amber and Jaipur as obtained from these manuscripts, is actually a complete work. As it was considered appropriate for serving as introduction to the index of the collection of manuscripts on the basis of which this has been written, this was added to the present volume. The plates have been included to give the general reader an idea of the manuscripts, their covers, binding, scripts, colophons and illustrations.

Sri Bahura is now engaged in preparing an annotated edition of the two Mancharitra manuscripts authored by Amrit Rai and Narottam discovered by him in this collection. It is also our endeavour to publish a facsimile edition of the Padavali of Surdas written for Chhitarji, son of Naraharidasji at Fatehpura in 1582 A. D., as also the index of the manuscripts of the Pothikhana and Pundarik collections and annotated editions of Ramvilas Kavya and Sawai Jai Singh Charitra. These will be published in the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh Memarial Series.

In view of the unforeseen difficulties the book could not be brought out earlier however much we wanted to do so. We hope that the book will be useful to the scholars.

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