Nuskha Dar Fanni-Falahat

The Asian Agri-History Foundation (AAHF), a non-profit Trust, was established and registered in 1994 to facilitate dissemination of information on agricultural history to promote research on sustainable agriculture in South and Southeast Asia region. This region had generally provided food security to its population for several millennia, with only occasional famines in a few limited pockets due primarily to drought. Farmers in the region had evolved some of the most sustainable agriculture management technologies suitable for different agroecoregions. There is a great deal to be learnt from the traditional wisdom and the indigenous, time-tested technologies that have sustained the farmers of South and Southeast Asia in the past. 

The historical perspective of gradual development of traditional technologies will provide clues for (i) understanding how farmers adjusted to changing environment in the past, and (ii) developing appropriate technologies leading to prosperous, sustainable agriculture. One of the major objectives of AAHF is to disseminate information on agriculture of the past by translating old texts/manuscripts into English and publish these translations with commentaries on the scientific content of texts. The aim of such commentaries by experts is to stimulate research to confirm, or otherwise, many old practices.

AAHF has so far published two bulletins: Vrikshayurveda (The Science of Plant Life) by Surapala (circa 1000 AD) and Krishi-Parashara (Agriculture by Parashara; circa 1st century AD). This bulletin, Nuskha Dar Fanni-Falahat (The Art of Agriculture) is approximately a 300-year-old manuscript written in Persian and the author, most likely, is Dara Shikoh. The manuscript of Nuskha Dar Fanni-Falahat (no. 51, Lytton collection) is available at the Maulana Azad Library of the Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India.