Gaya, June 18: Days after police recovered the stolen, 110-page manuscript, Gulistan, said to be handwritten by Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, experts have begun questioning the authenticity of the claim.

The manuscript was stolen six months ago from the locker at the Tekari Raj School and recovered last week.

A covering letter, recovered with the manuscript, indicates that Bulaki Das, a Delhi-based businessman, had sold the manuscript in 1881 to the Raja of Tekari, for Rs 2,000. Some of the thieves arrested last week claimed to have received offers of Rs 20 lakh from a Calcutta-based antique dealer.

In the letter, the seller claimed that his family had secured the manuscript during the plunder of Delhi by Nadir Shah. For eight generations, it lay buried at a secret place in his ancestral house, informs the letter of Bulaki Das.

Bulaki Das gave no indication why he chose to sell the manuscript. But his letter does claim that another copy of Gulistan, and a “less important” copy at that, was sold by the calligraphist Sheo Dhyan Singh of Lucknow for Rs 10,000.

Why then did Das sell the copy handwritten by Aurangzeb for one-fifth the price? He provides no answer.

It is not the job of the police to ascertain authenticity of the manuscript, says Raj Vardhan Sharma, zonal IG. Nor do the police have the expertise, he points out.

Director of Khuda Baksh Oriental Library, Patna, Prof Imtiaz Ahmed, who is also a well-known authority on medieval Indian history, says that in the second half of the eighteenth century, Delhi was flooded with objects and books with dubious links to the Mughal rulers. Many of them were counterfeit and fake. The authenticity of the manuscript, therefore, needs to be established first.

Prof Ahmed informed that a manuscript in Aurangzeb’s own handwriting is available at the Islamic monastery Khanqah Mujibia on the outskirts of Patna. Gulistan should be compared by experts and certified as copied by Aurangzeb himself, asserted Prof Ahmed.