“[These manuscripts are] our heritage—we must preserve it”

From 10 am to 5 pm, Isbah Khan, 61, is found in the Scholar’s Room at the Rampur Raza Library in UP, bent over a yellowing manuscript. As the library’s only Persian scholar, his days are busy cataloguing handwritten manuscripts that are several hundred years old, replete with obsolete terminologies. 

With a Masters and M. Phil in classical Persian, Isbah began his career at Aligarh Muslim University’s library. When his ailing father required him to return to his hometown, Rampur, he joined Raza Library as Junior Librarian. For the past 22 years, he has devoted himself to the manuscript section, now the prime consultant for researchers globally. When I chanced upon 200-year-old Persian cookbook manuscripts, I turned to Isbah sahib. He told me that no one had ever worked on them—we were on the cusp of discovering the antecedents of royal Rampuri cuisine.

It was a mammoth task—12 slim volumes with over 300 recipes each. We spent months gripped by brief and confusing instructions, unfamiliar ingredients, and decadent procedures. To translate, he had to refer to old Persian dictionaries: The Firoz ul Lughat, the Farhang e Amira, the 19th-century Standard Persian Dictionary. Ingredient measurements and their notations were deciphered using the Ain-i-Akbari. When we were stuck, he turned to older family members, gathering oral histories.

“Since the chefs were unlettered, they narrated the recipes to the scribes; often they would mix up steps… which is why they are so confusing.” His expertise was integral to my project reviving Rampur’s forgotten recipes under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Forgotten Foods Project.

Nearly 70% of the manuscripts at Raza Library have been digitised, thanks to Isbah sahib. “We don’t have enough scholars to translate or edit the manuscripts. This is our heritage—we must preserve it,” he says. One only needs to look at the Uttar Pradesh government’s recent One District One Cuisine scheme to understand his plea. “Even [with] the list compris[ing] only vegetarian dishes, the achars and murabbas developed under the Nawabs should have found mention; at least the halwa sohan [a traditional wheat-based sweet] of Rampur.”