Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian

From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Indian intellectuals produced numerous Sanskrit–Persian bilingual lexicons and Sanskrit grammatical accounts of Persian. However, these language analyses have been largely unexplored in modern scholarship. Select works have occasionally been noticed, but the majority of such texts languish unpublished. Furthermore, these works remain untheorized as a sustained, in-depth response on the part of India’s traditional elite to tremendous political and cultural changes. These bilingual grammars and lexicons are one of the few direct, written ways that Sanskrit intellectuals attempted to make sense of Indo-Persian culture in premodern and early modern India. Here I provide the most comprehensive account to date of the texts that constitute this analytical tradition according to three major categories: general lexicons, full grammars, and specialized glossaries. I further draw out the insights offered by these materials into how early modern thinkers used language analysis to try to understand the growth of Persian on the subcontinent

Hindutva’s Dangerous Rewriting of History

Hindu nationalists are heavily invested in rewriting Indian history to advance their modern and unrepentantly hateful political agenda. Hindu nationalism or Hindutva is a political ideology that advocates Hindu supremacy, specifically over Muslims who comprise around fourteen percent of modern India’s population. The similarity in name notwithstanding, Hindutva is distinct from Hinduism, a broad-based religious tradition, although Hindutva ideologues seek to constrict and flatten Hindu traditions. In this article, I describe some of the contours of the Hindutva investment in remaking the past as a means of advancing a modern political project. I also offer some thoughts on why Hindu nationalists care so much about history and explore some of the implications of Hindutva’s growing political influence for the field of South Asian history and academics who work therein

Cosmopolitan Encounters: Sanskrit and Persian at the Mughal Court

In this dissertation, I analyze interactions between Sanskrit and Persian literary cultures at the Mughal court during the years 1570-1650 C.E. During this period, the Mughals rose to prominence as one of the most powerful dynasties of the early modern world and patronized Persian as a language of both literature and empire. Simultaneously, the imperial court supported Sanskrit textual production, participated in Sanskrit cultural life, and produced Persian translations of Sanskrit literature. For their part, Sanskrit intellectuals became influential members of the Mughal court, developed a linguistic interest in Persian, and wrote extensively about their imperial experiences. Yet the role of Sanskrit at the Mughal court remains a largely untold story in modern scholarship, as do the resulting engagements across cultural lines. To the extent that scholars have thought about Sanskrit and Persian in tandem, they have generally been blinded by their own language barriers and mistakenly asserted that there was no serious interaction between the two. I challenge this uncritical view through a systematic reading of texts in both languages and provide the first detailed account of exchanges between these traditions at the Mughal court. I further argue that these cross-cultural events are central to understanding the construction of power in the Mughal Empire and the cultural and literary dynamics of early modern India

The Mughal Book of War: A Persian Translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata

This article presents the first in-depth textual analysis of the Razmnamah (Book of War), the Persian translation of the Mahabharata sponsored by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century. I argue that the Razmnamah was a central literary work in the Mughal court and of deep relevance to Akbar's imperial and political ambitions. I pursue my analysis of the Mughal Mahabharata in two sections, focusing first on the work's Sanskrit sources and then on the translation practices one finds evidenced in the Persian text. In the first section, I outline how the Mughal translators accessed Sanskrit materials and identify the Sanskrit texts that served as the basis for the Persian translation. This framework helps reconstruct the nature of the Mahabharata as the Mughals knew it and provides both the conceptual and literary tools needed to pursue comparative textual analysis. In the second section, I examine the text of the Razmnamah in comparison with its Sanskrit sources to highlight some of the Mughal translators' key strategies in reimagining the epic in Persian. This close reading traces several literary paradigms that offer insight into the crucial role the Razmnamah played in the production and reproduction of Mughal imperial culture. Taken as a whole, my analysis argues that the Razmnamah was a crucial component of the politico-cultural fashioning of Akbar's court, whereby the Mughals developed a new type of Indo-Persian imperial aesthetic

Setting the record wrong: a Sanskrit vision of Mughal conquests

In 1589, Padmasāgara wrote the first Sanskrit account of the Mughal rise to power within a short poem titled Jagadgurukāvya (Poem on the Teacher of the World). The work primarily eulogizes the life of a Jain religious leader named Hīravijaya, but Padmasāgara devotes one-third of the text to detailing the military exploits of Humayun and Akbar. Moreover, Padmasāgara departs significantly from known Indo-Persian historiography and imagines a startlingly innovative storyline for the early days of the Mughal Empire. Through this substantial rewriting, he furthermore consistently depicts the coerced establishment of Mughal rule as engendering the flourishing of Indian cultural and religious traditions. In this article, I provide the first detailed account of Padmasāgara's presentation of the battles of Humayun and Akbar to secure their claims over the subcontinent. I then seek to understand the motivations that fuelled this particular narrative by placing Jagadgurukāvya in the context of Gujarati relations with the Mughal court, Jain religious interests and historical sensibilities in early modern India. In his account of the early Mughal Empire, Padmasāgara crafts a political vision in which history is not constituted by a set of unchangeable facts but rather by a range of potential cultural implications that can be best realized through literature. His ambitious narrative about the recent past has important implications for how we understand early modern Sanskrit historiography and its relationship to Mughal power

Black Curls in a Mirror: The Eighteenth-Century Persian Kṛṣṇa of Lāla Amānat Rāy’s Jilwa-yi ẕāt and the Tongue of Bīdil

This paper is the first substantial study of the Jilwa-yi ẕāt, an unabridged Persian verse translation of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, completed in Delhi in 1732–33 by Amanat Ray, a Vaisnava pupil of the influential poet- philosopher Mırza ‘Abd al-Qadir Bıdil. The paper focuses especially on the textualization of Krsna and Krsnaite devotion within the framework of Persian literary conventions and the dominant Sufı-Vedantic conceptual atmosphere, with a special attention for the intertextual ties with the works of Bıdil. A few philological remarks on the contours of a hitherto largely ignored Krsnaite subjectivity in Persian are also included

Regional Perceptions. Writing to the Mughal Court in Sanskrit

From the 1580s to the 1640s, Jain and Brahman writers authored numerous Sanskrit praise poems addressed to members of the Mughal elite. In total, four authors dedicated seven full Sanskrit panegyrics to kings, princes, and members of the imperial administration during the reigns of Akbar through Shah Jahan. In this essay, I introduce these virtually unknown texts and analyze the insights such materials provide regarding regional perceptions of high Mughal culture and how individuals and communities participated in creating Mughal cosmopolitanism. All four authors wrote at the instigation of regional rulers or religious communities that sought to negotiate their political relationship with the imperial center. In large part, these authors and their patrons were responding to the sustained Mughal interest in translating Sanskrit works and supporting Sanskrit textual production. Sanskrit encomia are an untold part of the larger story of Mughal cross-cultural interests and demonstrate how a variety of Indians envisioned the Mughal ruling class as open to engaging with Sanskrit literature. Through these works, Jain and Brahman authors proclaim a political place for Sanskrit in the Mughal imperium and, more specifically, a cultural space for Sanskrit aesthetics.Des années 1580 aux années 1640, des auteurs jains et brahmanes ont composé de nombreux poèmes de louange en sanskrit adressés aux membres de l’élite moghole. Au total, quatre auteurs ont dédié sept panégyriques entièrement en sanskrit à des rois, des princes, et des membres de l’administration impériale entre les règnes d’Akbar et de Shah Jahan. Dans cet article, je présente ces textes pratiquement inconnus et j’analyse les apports de ces matériaux concernant les perceptions régionales de la haute culture moghole et la manière dont des individus et des communautés variés ont participé à la création du cosmopolitisme moghol. Les quatre auteurs ont écrit à l’instigation de leaders régionaux ou de communautés religieuses qui cherchaient à « négocier » leur relation politique avec le centre impérial. Ce faisant, ces auteurs et leurs mécènes réagissaient pour bonne part à l’intérêt nourri de Moghols pour la traduction d’ouvrages en sanskrit et à leur soutien à la production de textes en sanskrit. Les panégyriques sanskrits sont une partie inédite de l’histoire plus large des intérêts interculturels moghols et montrent que différents Indiens ont perçu la classe dirigeante moghole comme étant ouverte à la littérature sanskrite. À travers leurs écrits, ces auteurs jains et brahmanes revendiquent une place politique pour le sanskrit dans l’empire moghol et, plus précisément, un espace culturel pour l’esthétique sanskrite