In Culture of Encounters, Audrey Truschke offers a fresh perspective on the underexplored history of Sanskrit literary activity at the Mughal court during the period between 1560 and 1660. The first truly comprehensive study using both Persian and Sanskrit sources from this period, Culture of Encounters examines how scholarly engagement in both elite languages helped diverse communities formulate new political identities while transforming literary, aesthetic, and historical sensibilities in Persian and Sanskrit contexts. While other scholars have focused on cross-cultural encounters at the Mughal court, the impressive breadth of Truschke's research in multiple archives and her clear analysis of a challenging subject makes this a notable contribution to Mughal and Sanskrit literary history.
Truschke rightly critiques the limited analytical frameworks offered by viewing such literary activity as exercises in building legitimacy (p. 2). Instead, by contrasting the role of Jain and Hindu intellectuals in these encounters with Mughal officials, Truschke demonstrates the varied motivations and aesthetics that drove such activity, as well as the complicated legacies of these projects. Several counterintuitive but sound methodological interventions ground the arguments in this book. Following Allison Busch's argument that scholars writing in languages other than Persian were “hidden in plain view” within the Mughal court, Truschke reveals why the silence of official Persian histories on literary activity in Sanskrit should not be taken as an indication of the absence or low esteem of Sanskrit learning at the Mughal court.Footnote 1 Three substantial chapters demonstrate the breadth of literary activity in Sanskrit (chapters 1, 2, and 5), while two more delineate the disparate ways in which Persian scholars accessed Sanskrit literary works and wrestled with the conceptual and aesthetic world views they encountered (chapters 3–4). The last chapter integrates these earlier arguments by examining how Sanskrit was integrated into the larger Persianate world both within and outside the Mughal court.
Another counterintuitive but convincing claim that Truschke advances is that elite textual activity in Sanskrit and Persian was crucially grounded in the oral and aural vernacular forms, most likely Hindi. Other recent works have touched on this as well, but Truschke goes much further in probing the diverse ways in which vernacular contexts were the building blocks of Sanskrit and Persian engagements. Few Sanskrit intellectuals mastered literary Persian and no Mughal ruler was fluent in Sanskrit, even if some nobility and princes may have achieved limited facility in both tongues. Vernacular communication and access to regional networks allowed Jain monks and Hindu Brahmins to participate in court debates and facilitated the translation projects of classical Sanskrit texts into Persian. Such scholars also likely used the vernacular in their official role as court astrologers and tutors to royals and nobility, as well as in diplomatic and ritual activities (pp. 66–69).
Having negotiated the twin dilemmas posed by the silence of court documents about Sanskrit in the Mughal court and the lack of Sanskrit fluency among the Mughal elite, Truschke is able to outline another substantial contribution to the running controversy about the nature of “Indo-Persian” as a category. The idea of Mughal cosmopolitanism, particularly in the expressive domain of Persophone literary and courtly production, has often raised questions about the relationship between the local and cosmopolitan in the Mughal world. Did the Mughal elite prioritize an outward-looking form of universal sovereignty, expressed through norms of civility, aesthetics, and courtly conduct widely shared across the Islamicate and Persianate worlds, or did forms of local cultural expression also influence the self-image and expression of the Mughal court? Here, Truschke's response is incisive: “My arguments here do not negate the links between Mughal India and other Persianate regions and empires, but my work pointedly underscores identifiably Indian aspects of Persianate intellectual and literary culture on the subcontinent” (p. 242). Indeed, this claim is sustained throughout this study.
The greatest contribution that Truschke's work makes is that it demonstrates in very concrete ways how much Indic notions of royal power, ethics, and cosmologies interested Mughal patrons and shaped their self-image and political outreach. Both in terms of what scholars in these Sanskrit-Persian encounters expressed in texts, and even more critically through their textual silence, Truschke shows the strategic ways in which a diversity of individuals and communities responded to these encounters and each other. Further, by identifying and contrasting the steady growth in Jain Sanskrit texts of deep engagement with Mughal political culture and historical sensibilities, versus the studied silencing and distancing from Persianate historicism by Hindu Brahmans at the Mughal court, Truschke offers an intriguing look at the disparate intellectual reception within Sanskrit intellectual communities of these encounters (pp. 239–42).
The clarity and nuances of this complex work will likely appeal to scholars of Mughal history and Persian and Sanskrit literary studies. Truschke's emphasis on the need to train multilingual scholars to study the Persianate and Mughal contexts is also a useful reminder to graduate programs in the diverse disciplines that feed into these fields of study and is likely to stimulate further debates. While Truschke's work focuses on the imperial center, the crucial role played by regional vernaculars and literary networks is also strongly suggested throughout, offering promising scope for future research.
