In his The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), Marshall Hodgson remarks of that civilization that it failed to retain and cultivate the pre-Islamic “lettered traditions” of the region of its earliest emergence. Literacy in Aramaic, Syriac, and Pahlavi was entirely displaced by Arabic and Persian, and Muslims largely ceased to read pre-Islamic texts in their original languages. By contrast, major religiopolitical transformations in other civilizations did not lead to the demise of literacy in Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese, respectively, but entailed their continued cultivation among elites. In a sense, Audrey Truschke's Culture of Encounters complicates Hodgson's thesis by arguing that, from around 1550 to 1650, Sanskrit texts were constitutive of imperial Mughal self-understanding and that such involvement with the central Mughal court led in turn to innovations in Sanskrit poetry and history by the Brahman and Jain intellectuals patronized by this court. The introduction states the central thesis of Truschke's book: that such Mughal courtly patronage of “Sanskrit intellectuals, texts, and knowledge systems” was not a case of “Legitimation Theory”—that is, the idea that the Mughal rulers saw such patronage as legitimizing them in the gaze of their subject populations; but that it was in fact a mode of royal self-fashioning motivated by their self-identification as Indian kings, as kings in an indigenous Indian tradition that preceded them (p. 2).

Chapter 1, “Brahman and Jain Sanskrit Intellectuals at the Mughal Court,” usefully tabulates the names of Sanskrit intellectuals, their dates, the titles of their works, and a summary of their activities, especially astronomical ones. Noteworthy is a subsection on “official titles” bestowed by the emperors on Jains and Brahmans at their court, of which Truschke notes: “To date, no scholar has compiled the information available about this diverse cultural activity, much less analyzed titles as a social and imperial practice” (p. 55). In fact, this formulation metonymically captures the achievement of this book at large: the compiling of information on Mughal courtly practices that led to the composition of Sanskrit texts and Sanskrit-related Persian texts—practices related to what Dominick LaCapra termed the “documentary” rather than “work-like” dimensions of texts. Truschke's book offers a masterful survey that, in LaCapra's formulation, “situates the text in terms of factual or literal dimensions involving reference to empirical reality and conveying information about it” (Dominick LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language,” History and Theory 19 [1980], 250). The worklike dimensions of a text, LaCapra argues, “supplements empirical reality by adding to, and subtracting from, it. It thereby involves dimensions of the text not reducible to the documentary, prominently including the roles of commitment, interpretation, and imagination” (p. 250). These dimensions largely receive less attention than the factual or documentary ones in Truschke's book. The facts that emerge gain their pertinence from the question that Truschke poses to the Mughal past at the outset: what was “the forgotten history of Sanskrit at the central Mughal court from 1560 to 1660” that makes it “critical to understanding early modern literary dynamics and the construction of authority during Mughal rule” (p. 4)? But how does this question itself gain its salience?

The salience of this question derives, Truschke herself notes, from two stakes. The first is scholarly: the assumption that a Persianate dynasty such as the Mughals requires to be studied mainly if not exclusively through Persianate sources. This assumption, however, has more justification for it than Truschke allows. The two main courtly genres she is concerned with in this book, poetry and history, both acquired their conspicuous features in the Timurid court of late 15th-century Herat. Subrahmanyam and Alam speak in their preface to Writing the Mughal World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) of a “historiographical revolution of sorts in the Central Asian and Iranian Timurid world effected by writers such as Sharaf-ud-Din Yazdi, ʿAbdur Razzaq Samarqandi, and Mir Khwand, and the Mughals undoubtedly carried that tradition forward and consolidated it further south” (p. 2). And Paul Losensky showed in his Welcoming Fighani (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Press, 1998) that our current sense of the Persian poetic canon is indebted to the editorial, encyclopedic, and canonizing efforts of Timurid literati. To claim, then, that “the Mughals articulated their political claims largely through interacting with the Sanskrit tradition” is an overstatement of the case (p. 4). It is also to omit the ritual and literary invocations of the Chinghisid-Mongol heritage through which Mughals articulated political claims. A soberer assessment might be that the central Mughal court's roughly century-long preoccupation with Sanskrit was selectively submitted to a variety of cultural filters, oral and written, through which it was rendered coherent with literary and ethical courtly values already crystallized in the Persianate ecumene.

The other stake is popular: the assumption that the Muslim dynasty that immediately preceded British colonial rule in India either took an interest in things Sanskritic because it sought legitimacy among the Indian masses or, contradictorily, that it took little to no interest in such non-Islamic matters. Truschke's book is a welcome dismissal of both notions. However, it is hardly the first such dismissal. Julie Scott Meisami's classic Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987) takes it for granted that Persian poetry patronized by 11th- and 12th-century Iranian and Central Asian courts was aimed at the ethical transformation in a variety of genre-specific ways of the royal or courtly addressee; that its poetic means, aims, and accomplishments were confined to a courtly ambit, bearing no significance for popular legitimacy. And after all, why should this be surprising for any period before the age of mass politics?

Chapter 2, “Sanskrit Textual Production for the Mughals,” surveys Sanskrit language texts composed for the Mughal ruling elite. After speculating on the probable scenarios in which the Mughals who did not know Sanskrit may still have recognized phrases of what was being read aloud to them or may have had rough oral Hindi translations to accompany them, the chapter turns to an exposition of a number of such Sanskrit texts, especially bilingual dictionaries.

Chapter 3, “Many Persian Mahābhāratas for Akbar,” forms the book's core chapter in the sense that it discusses the longest and most worklike of the texts under study, Persian or Sanskrit. Its focus is three Persian retellings of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, the first and longest entitled the Razmnamah that was commissioned by Akbar. Truschke underscores that these translations are not cases of legitimation theory, that “we are best served by abandoning the modern fantasy that there is a split between literary and political worlds,” and that “exerting influence within literary and cultural realms was itself a valid and vital royal activity in early modern India” (p. 125). However, we must bear in mind that this “modern fantasy” was never even in question in Meisami's Medieval Persian Court Poetry, a work that assumes the fusion of aesthetics and politics because of their shared elite aim of transforming royal subjectivity. Oddly, at this point, Truschke contradicts her own oft-repeated argument when she writes on page 130: “Moreover, rather than relying on Islamic leaders, Akbar wishes to empower ‘common people among the Muslims’ to judge such matters for themselves, based on a translation that Akbar has made available.” She adds on page 131:

We might explain this contradiction by Truschke's tendency to describe the explicit features of her sources rather than pause long enough to infer their implicit ones. The reader barely gets a sense of the immanent world of any one work of imaginative literature. This is possibly on account of the imperative Truschke felt to be comprehensive in an arithmetical sense. But are there not alternative models of comprehensiveness in works such as Meisami's Medieval Persian Court Poetry or David Shulman's The King and Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014)? Meisami and Shulman, to take just two prominent models of comprehensive characterizations of a premodern literary culture, offer intensive engagements of the inner worlds of key poetic texts that they frame either as representative of high points of achievement in certain poetic genres (Meisami) or as ends on a spectrum of cultural character types (Shulman). But this requires that patterns inferred from closely read texts be generalizable to other texts of the same class, a class making up the theoretical armature of the book. In the absence of such an armature, Truschke resorts to exhaustive listing and touch and go characterizations of texts, leading her to contradict her overarching argument against “Legitimation Theory” by taking Abu al-Fazl at face value when he wrote of a translation into “a language intelligible beyond elite circles” (p. 131).

Chapter 5, “Writing about the Mughal World in Sanskrit,” offers a rare exposition of Jain- and Brahman-authored Sanskrit histories of the Mughals. Truschke leaves us with the overall conclusion that “a heterogeneous historical consciousness, the importance of representation, and the close relationship between religion and politics” were “vital features of early modern Sanskrit intellectual culture” (p. 201). Insofar as anyone might imagine that culture to have been aloof from surrounding political goings on, this is a welcome dismissal. But otherwise, it is hard to think of an early modern culture that did not bear these features.

Chapter 6, “Incorporating Sanskrit into the Persianate World,” discusses courtly Persian translations of the Sanskrit texts, especially the Ramayaṇa and the Razmnama. The penultimate section of the chapter comprises a survey of Persian royal lineages (rājāvalī), illustrating how ruling elites increasingly came to inscribe themselves into chronologies that integrated pre-Islamic and Islamic rule of India into a single stream. The final section offers a valuable conspectus of Dara Shikuh's legacy, reassessing his interests in Sanskrit as far narrower than those of his predecessors and thus possibly having compromised his efforts to win the Mughal throne.

The conclusion offers a valuable characterization of the Mughal court as a frontier or contact zone in which “members of largely discrete traditions came into contact with one another” (p. 232). It concludes with a reflection on the value for “imperial history” of the methods Truschke has adopted in this book. With reference to the latter, she writes: “Chief among the concerns of those who want to parse imperial formations ought to be literature, aesthetics, and cross cultural exchanges” (p. 247). It is worth recalling, though, that for Michel Foucault representations derived their value for the analysis of power from their locus in institutions and practices embedded within them. The human subject was thus not a freestanding recipient of such representations but situated within an identifiably empirical and constraining locus. This means that traditional scholarly consideration of, say, the mansabdārī or Mughal military-administrative system as a technology of imperial power cannot be wholly displaced by attention to elite preoccupations with poetry and history. Rather, what remains to be answered is how such elite processes of subject formation may have related to the devolution of imperial power into nonelite locales, what if anything such aesthetics of royal self-fashioning may have meant in those locales, and what institutions outside courts may have mediated the power of the central and subimperial Mughal courts.

Notwithstanding these reservations, the benefits of this book make it richly worth the while of cultural historians of Mughal India and literary scholars of precolonial Persian, Sanskrit, and South Asian vernacular literatures. All of them will discover in Culture of Encounters information on Persian and Sanskrit's roughly century long affair with each other that is either unavailable or highly dispersed in any European language. At a time of rising Hindu jingoism in India, nonscholarly readers, too, may have their historical imaginations beneficially complicated by this accessibly written study of the last flourishing of Sanskrit literary culture in the heart of Islamic imperial power.