Bijapur Collection

[2] The building was home to a college and theological school founded by Mohammed Adil Shah, Sultan of Bijapur, to house a relic of the Prophet.

The scholar Charles d'Ochoa visited between 1841 and 1843, and arranged the manuscripts, separating "those preserved from the those utterly destroyed.

"[3] Subsequently Henry Bartle Frere, the commissioner of the area, had a catalogue of the Bijapur collection prepared in Urdu by Hamīd al-din Ḥakīm, and that was translated into English by Erskine.

Following an examination of the catalogue by one John Wilson, assisted by local scholars, it was decided that the whole collection should be sent to the Court of Directors of the East India Company in London.

[7] After a considerable hiatus, Qureshi provided a summary of the collection in 1980,[8] but no in-depth analysis undertaken until 2016 when Overton examined some of the notations, seals and bindings.

Page from the commentary on ʻAbd Allāh ibn Hishām al-Anṣārī's work Mughnī al-labīb by Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr ad-Damāmīnī (d. circa 1424) with seals of Mahmud Gawan . British Library , India Office , IO Bijapur 7, Otto Loth's Catalogue , no. 967.