A Study of Script Style in one of the Lataif-Al-Tafsir's Manuscript (Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament, No. 12298)

The written element of script is considered as one of the basic elements used in writing and manuscripts and the main purpose of this research is to derive and study an unknown style of script that has written in Lataif-Al-Tafsir book. It was also known in manuscripts during the history of calligraphy. Traditional calligraphy has been used with various shapes in different parts of Islamic realm, in a way that in each place, it took its own specific zonal style and sometimes with the introduction of writers and calligrapher, it took a new shape. Thus, in several manuscripts written in ninth/fifteenth and early of tenth/sixteenth century in India, a particular method can be found that within a different and unknown style of calligraphy can be seen. This way of writing has been named Bihari in some appendix. However, until now, a definite analysis of visual features of this style and its relation to traditional calligraphy has not been introduced and only we can see concise ideas and hints about this script in appendix. With this purpose, a manuscript from Lataif-Al-Tafsir book (Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament, No. 12298) is chosen and the morphology of its script will be studied by historic, analytic and comparative style. Until now, the features of this style have been considered lesser in appendix. However, the visual analysis of Lataif-Al-Tafsir's script and its comparison with styles of traditional calligraphy can be effective in knowing this script style.
With this introduction, in this article it is tried to specify the main features of scripts in manuscript and derive the relation of this script with traditional calligraphy in order to partly show the unknown features of the script. In the present article, the main hypothesis is that, given to the diversity and variety of scripts, different methods in script of manuscript known as Bihari script use the features of traditional calligraphy and within the initial letters are similar to Naskh and distance between letters can show some features of early Kufic scripts. Thus, whatever makes the features of this script different probably return to the combination of characteristics in different scripts that is also accompanied with some new features such as exaggeration in the size of letters, contrast in the weight, frequent use of kashida and variation in letters, by this it took a different feature. Another hypothesis is the use of qalam in writing this script that it seems most letters were written by the nish of qalam and kashida was written by the whole nib of qalam. This shows the extensive capability of traditional calligraphy in writing and calligraphy, and it is important because of its unique features which can help reaching a new look in type design and providing different contexts in this field of graphic design. As a result, script of Lataif-Al-Tafsir's manuscript and similar examples known as Bihari are inspired from naskh script which were combined with some features of different scripts and were known among Indian Persian speakers during ninth/fifteenth and early of tenth/sixteenth.