This special collection, guest-edited by Luther Obrock, explores what he describes as “Sanskrit interlopers in a Persian age”. Engaging with the issue of its purported ‘decline’ that has been long embedded in academic and non-academic debates, the collection's articles collectively address the complexity of Sanskrit, and Sanskrit's use, under the sovereignty of Muslim polities in second-millennium North India (twelfth to seventeenth centuries ce). By focusing on the context within which Sanskrit material was copied or composed at Sultanate and Mughal courts, it makes a very timely contribution towards deconstructing “the simple cultural binaries of Hindu and Muslim in South Asian history”.
In this venture, Obrock is joined by four other scholars, namely Daud Ali, Shankar Nair, Pranav Prakash and Steven M. Vose, whose combined efforts have resulted in a set of essays that shed new light on “Sanskrit's various uses in an increasingly vernacularised or Persianised world”. Encompassing literature and mercantile dealings, the lives of poets and scenes of authorship, a Jain monk and his relationship to Muslim rulers, and more, key challenges are raised, such as: How did the increasingly powerful transregional language of Persian impinge upon Sanskrit literary culture? And did Sanskrit become merely a “dead” language for elites, or rather did it evolve into an additional ‘vernacular’ that allowed poets, among others, added freedoms? Through its attention to these and other questions, the collection provides valuable insights on how, and how far, supposedly ‘dead’ languages can resonate powerfully with respect to unfolding literary, political and social cultures during periods of significant historical change and continuity.
JRAS readers interested in the changing ways in which the study of Sanskrit has been approached over the last (nearly) two centuries will find much evidence on this contained in the pages of earlier issues, now available in digital libraries such as jstor and via the journal's Cambridge Core website.)
