Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court

"In one way or another, each of these five books revises earlier scholarship. For her part, Audrey Truschke upends the long-held assumption, which she demonstrates to be incorrect, that the Mughal Empire was an essentially Persianate empire, ruled through the Persian language to the exclusion of other literary traditions. This she does by highlighting the prominent role played by Sanskrit literati who were active at the very heart of the empire: the Mughal court. From reading most histories of Mughal India, one might imagine that Sanskrit, if not suppressed, was at least absent from the courtly world. But she shows how the Mughals, in fact, patronized a large number of Sanskrit intellectuals, both Brahmans and Jains. Some were given Sanskrit as well as Persian titles. For about a hundred years, extending from Akbar’s reign through the end of that of Shah Jahan in the mid 17th century, a large number of Sanskrit intellectuals were present at the court, particularly from the 1560s to roughly 1600. Her findings thus complement what Moin was saying about the presence of Central Asian ideas in Mughal ideology. Even while the Mughals articulated claims to sovereign authority that had originated in Iran or Central Asia, they also incorporated Indian, indeed Hindu, conceptions of kingship. They wished to be seen as Indian kings just like earlier Indian kings. One of the things they did was to follow the ancient Indian royal practice of patronizing Brahmans. In Hindu kingdoms, Brahmans had served not just as priests, but as ministers of state, poets, astrologers, and literati who authored treatises on a broad range of topics, including statecraft. While inheriting such indigenous traditions, the Mughals also wanted to recenter the Persianate world around India, rather than Iran. Like many multicultural empires, the Mughals were a many-splendoured thing. Truschke convincingly shows how, for the Mughals, the Indian component of their ruling ideology focused on patronizing Brahman and Jain intellectuals, thereby integrating Sanskrit as part of their ruling repertoire. Dozens of dictionaries were compiled under Mughal patronage, both from Sanskrit to Persian and Persian to Sanskrit. Fundamental Hindu texts, particularly the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , were translated into Persian under court sponsorship. We actually have miniature paintings of Brahmans and Persian literati seated on either side of a room, busily translating texts from Sanskrit to Persian through the medium of spoken Hindawi, their common, vernacular language. The image draws our attention to how avidly the Mughals sought to incorporate into their own Persian-speaking world the classic epics that for centuries had enlivened the Indian imagination. To make the Mughals a truly Indian empire, then, Persian-speaking courtiers and administrators endeavoured to participate in this larger, mythic universe. The scale of this translation project, moreover, was considerable. There are 24 separate Persian versions of the Ramayana , and thousands of manuscripts of this and other translated Sanskrit works scattered across India, which is quite remarkable. We might think of these projects as ‘creative adaptations’. For example, Krishna, who is both a human and divine figure in the Sanskrit Ramayana , is not at all divine in the Persian translation; he’s simply a wise teacher. Or again, whereas the Sanskrit Ramayana emphasizes ‘dharma’ (proper behaviour according to one’s social station), the emphasis in the Persian translation is on kingly virtue. Similarly, the other Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, is filled with many deities, whereas its Persian translation is pervaded by a monotheistic spirit. So Truschke’s book explores not just the fact of translation, but how those translations accommodated the cultural expectations of their target audience. Not surprisingly, theology was a tricky dimension that the translators had to negotiate, and it required a certain sleight-of-hand. For example, the Mughals understood the Jain worldview as having a god which, of course, is not really the case, since Jainism, like Buddhism, is strictly speaking atheistic. Nonetheless, Mughal translators defined the arhat , or the enlightened teacher, as standing in for God, and many Jains seem to have played along with the idea. In essence, the book explores a fascinating dimension of cross-cultural interaction under the Mughals."