[IO Islamic 2097] بهرام و گلندام

Bahrâm-u-Gulandâm

This manuscript is now IO Islamic 1697 in the India Office collections.

[metadata: Hermann Ethé, Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office, 2 vols. (Oxford: India Office, 1903): volume 1, number 2097 here with notations and hyperlinks].

1697

Bahrâm u Gulandâm (بهرام و گلندام).

The love-story of prince Bahrâm and Gulandâm, a romantic mathnawî which seems to be identical with Amîn’s epopee of the same title, noticed in Rieu ii. p. 877b. It opens here with seven admonitions (پند), on fol. 1a, thus: بخواهم گفتنت هفت پند موزون الخ.

The story itself begins, on fol. 4a, with the following chapter: بخشيدن شاه كشور تاج و جهان پيمائى به بهرام.

Rieu’s copy is dated A.H. 1147 (A.D. 1734, 1735), the present one the 18th of Jumâdâ-althânî, A.H. 1224 (A.D. 1809, July 31). A version of the same story in Pushtû verses by a poet with the takhalluṣ Fayyâḍ is preserved in No. 3249 of the India Office Collection.

It is written in stanzas of unequal length, each of which is a ghazal, somewhat like Bâ’îkhân’s مجنون و ليلى , see Z. D. M. G. xvi. P. 789; another version in the Gûrân dialect of Eastern Kurdistân is described in Rieu ii. p. 734; a third in Dakhnî verses by Ṭab’î is noticed in A. Sprenger, Catal., pp. 639 and 643; the last-mentioned was composed A.H. 1081 (A.D. 1670, 1671).

No. 2097, ff. 113, 2 coll., each ll. 12; large and distinct Nasta’lîḳ; size, 8¼ in. by 5¾ in.