Abstract
Scholarship on illustrated lithographs produced in nineteenth-century South Asia and their connection to the manuscript tradition is still in its infancy. While art-historical research into illustrated lithographs in Qajar Iran has been firmly established by the work of Ulrich Marzolph, the images produced in lithographs in related genres in British India have yet to be studied in detail. My article explores the genealogy of Tilismat-i ʿAjāʾib (Talismans of Wonder) texts, a genre that features elements of cosmology and divination, in Urdu lithographs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the illustrative programs in these texts and positing a continuity with the Persian ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt (“Wonders of Creation”) manuscript tradition. In addition to working toward establishing a basis for the empirical study of this genre of Urdu lithographs, my article examines the social use of these texts beyond reading, such as practices of bibliomancy and divination, to create new audiences and spheres of meaning as mass-produced cosmological images were able to circulate more widely. Although cosmological imagery enjoyed a certain continuity from manuscript to lithography production, it was accompanied by a semiotic shift that imbued images with new meanings in the mass-produced and widely circulated lithographs. This shift complicates the question of the role that printing technologies played in bringing about colonial modernity and the resulting rupture in cultures of Islamic knowledge production and its “disenchantment.” If anything, lithograph production gave new life to forms of premodern knowledge that we would describe as “enchanted.”