India 1829-1880

For hundreds of years German Orientalists, German Islamologists ignored South Asian and Malay Islam ‒ even the Maghrib lay outside their interest.
Many German Islamologists had never seen an Indian, Indonesian, or Moroccan muṣ­ḥaf. When they wrote about Indian prints, they relied on lists made by Chau­vin (Bobzin) or claimed to have seen books in a library that has no such books (R. Schulze, Bonn univer­sity library).
The only early Indian maṣāḥif I had seen, were copies given by the great publisher Munshi Naval Kishore to Oxford Univer­sity Library and scanned by Google ‒ in the wrong order.
Now there are hundreds of early Indian prints held by the British Libray and scanned by Gale avail­able.
So here are some of these holdings.

this is the beginning of the qurʾān taken from a 1829 print with translation and commentary by Shah ʿAbdul Qadir, a younger son of Shah Waliullah Dihlavi called Mūẓiḥ al-Qurʾān

A Calcutta print of 1256/1840 is remarably similar:

from Sahib Alam (Egypt, Qatar)

Before I will show more early prints from India, let me give the global picture.
At the time maṣā­ḥif were printed in Kazan and Persia (Tehran 1829, Shiraz 1830 Tebriz 1832) ‒ see the next post
In Istanbul there were officially prints from 1875 on;
from Cairo we have prints from that period, a bit later (1879,'81,'91, '92,'93,'94, '95,'99, 1900 and 1905)
from Faz.



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