The manuscripts exhibit two basic styles of binding. The
traditional local style is in the manner of pothi (‘book’) or
khata (‘account book’), both prevalent in what is now western
India and Pakistan in the 18th and 19th centuries CE. In the
late 19th century CE, binding practices also became strongly
influenced by European stab-sewing styles. In the traditional
pothi and khata styles of binding, the untrimmed leaves of
paper, or folliers, are collectively folded within leather
covers and sewn together at the fold without supports. The
leather is usually reddish brown in colour, and often blind
tooled on the outside with a variety of designs such as leaves,
rosettes or grids. In the majority of cases, the leather cover
was cut slightly larger than the paper so that the text is
completely covered. Occasionally, the cover is the same size as
each page, which results in an emphasis of the chevron (an
inverted V shape) of untrimmed paper. Usually some heavy string
was employed for the binding. The European style