The history of the Mughal Empire in the first half of the seventeenth century has typically suffered from a dearth of both overarching interpretative arguments characterizing the period at large and more detailed monographical treatments. In the first category, some of the most important insights have been negative ones—for instance, in J. F. Richards and Sanjay Subrahmanyam's arguments that South Asia fits with difficulty into accounts of a global seventeenth-century crisis. The second category of scholarship has seen greater activity, notably in recent works of intellectual history by Supriya Gandhi and Rajeev Kinra on important figures in the courtly milieu of the reign of Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58). Joining these contributions are the two works under review, both dealing with the earlier part of the century.
The first work, Translating Wisdom by Shankar Nair, while situating itself in debates within the discipline of religious studies, also finds its place in the growing interest in intellectual history among scholars of early modern Islamic South Asia. While partly anticipated in earlier scholarship, notably in the sweeping works of Athar Abbas Rizvi from the 1960s and 1970s, detailed studies of Islamic scholastic material that deal head-on with problems of contextualization are a relatively recent development, and Nair contributes valuable insights to this emerging field.
The second work, Pouvoir impérial et élites dans l'Inde moghole de Jahangir by Corinne Lefèvre, resurrects and renews a neglected model of scholarship: the “total” study of a courtly society as it comes to be configured in a single reign. This type of study reached its hitherto most sophisticated form in the first half of the twentieth century, notably in the work of the historian Beni Prasad, whose monograph, published in 1922, like Lefèvre's, centered on the reign of Jahangir (r. 1605–28). Lefèvre departs from this earlier model in the breadth of her references and the depth of her analyses, which move between granular engagements with sources and accounts of the larger structures of empire.
Beyond their shared chronologies, the two works can be read together as illustrating analytical positions available to scholars working at different scales: Lefèvre's account, working at the largest imperial level, demonstrates how the vagaries of political maneuvering and cultural production in a single reign take on structural features that are peculiar to that reign, irreducible either to the figure of the emperor or to some kind of dynastic essence. Nair's account, beginning with a single text, shows how the philosophical ambitions of scholars within courtly settings could exceed those settings themselves and find their real significance within intellectual traditions operating on longer timescales.
The point of departure for Nair's Translating Wisdom is a set of issues posed by the translation into Persian in 1597 of the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha, a narrative philosophical work that had been written by Gauda Abhinanda in Sanskrit sometime between the tenth and fourteenth centuries CE. The translation, titled Jūg Bāsisht in Persian, had been commissioned by Jahangir and was undertaken by a translation team consisting of a courtly scholar named Niẓām al-Dīn Pānīpatī and two Hindu pandits, Miśra Banārasī and Paṭhān Miśra Jājīpūrī. While the Sanskrit-Persian translation movement of the Mughal Empire, of which the Jūg Bāsisht formed a part, has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, Nair's introduction points out that many foundational questions about the movement remain to be explored. If the dominant scholarly gesture has hitherto been to see such translations as part of the political legitimation of the Mughal Empire, Nair takes a different approach and asks what the process of translation entailed at an intellectual level. The task of the monograph, as laid out in the introductory chapter, is accordingly to ask how Hindus and Muslims made each other's religious and philosophical views “comprehensible, not only to each other, but to any educated Persian reader,” by illustrating the “inter-religious ‘dialogue’” (Nair, p. 2) and “implicit theory of translation” that the production of the Jūg Bāsisht entailed (Nair, p. 3). The remainder of the introduction provides the scholarly and methodological background to Nair's inquiry and situates his work in recent literature on the religious interactions of Hindus and Muslims. While welcoming recent efforts to move away from reified notions of Hinduism and Islam, Nair notes that participants in the translation movement itself often posited two discrete traditions that they were mediating between. His own approach is thus to analyze the translators’ own “internal conceptualization of religions” and also their “own methodologies” for the comparative study of religions (Nair, p. 12).
The difficulty of analyzing the Jūg Bāsisht in any kind of self-evident historical context lies in the absence of biographical information on the three authors of the translation. Nair thus proposes to contextualize it philosophically, by examining how it instantiated the confluence of three different intellectual “jet streams”: the Hindu Vedānta tradition, Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, and the idea of wahdat al-wujūd (unity of being). Accordingly, after a first chapter that discusses the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha and the Jūg Bāsisht, there are three chapters that deal with different figures who each serve as examples one of the different jet streams: Madhusūdana Sarasvati (fl. sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), Muḥibb Allah Illāhābādī (d. 1648), and Mīr Firindirski (d. 1640/41). These are followed by a chapter that returns to the Jūg Bāsisht in light of the preceding analysis of the different jet streams. The concluding chapter addresses methodological debates within religious studies, asking what the models of thinking about religion and comparison seen in the Jūg Bāsisht might offer to the contemporary discipline.
The reign of Jahangir, Lefèvre notes in the second volume under review, has been neglected by historians of the Mughal Empire because it seems to present little movement on the two axes along which the development of the empire has traditionally been understood: innovation in the institutions of government and expansion by conquest. The point of departure for her work is to argue that rather than seeing the empire inherited by Jahangir in 1605 as a centralized and pacified state to which his reign simply provided continuity, it must be understood as consisting of a balance of forces, including, along with the institutional and ideological “tools” for holding the edifice together (Lefèvre, p. 26), numerous bases of opposition to the dynasty.
Lefèvre's volume begins with an introduction that provides a brief overview of the historical context in which the reign of Jahangir unfolded and a prologue that traces the formation of the historiographical figure of the emperor across European travel accounts, Indo-Persian chronicles written in subsequent reigns, and colonial and modern historiography. Here Lefèvre sheds light on the sources of the major interpretations—scholarly and popular—of the reign: the figure of the emperor as exceptionally devoted to justice, as dominated by Nur Jahan, as dissolute, and as despotic.
The core of the volume consists of three parts, each divided into four chapters. The first part examines the emperor, analyzing his career as a prince—the period in which he provided the patronage that resulted in the Jūg Bāsisht—as well as his relationship to his father and other ancestors, and his relationship to religion. This part includes an important discussion of the discursive development of the idea of empire through the iconography of the globe, images of the emperor alongside contemporary emperors, and through his relationship to nature.
The second part examines subimperial figures of the reign, analyzing the mansabdar corps, the integration of elites into the imperial nobility, the provincial bases of powerful nobles, and princely rebellion. This section is based on research on works produced in the courts of major nobles; indeed, the attention to subimperial literature forms a major contribution of Lefèvre's book as a whole.
The third part examines the patronage or marginalization of religious elites by the empire. As Lefèvre notes, there have been no comprehensive studies of religious culture in the empire focused on the first half of the seventeenth century. This part is expansive in the way it addresses this lacuna, including accounts—helpfully classified cross-confessionally by degree of proximity to the court—of Vaishnavites, Shaivites, Jains, Chishtis and Naqshbandis, along with individual figures like Jadrūp, ‘Abd al-Haqq Muhaddith Dehlavi, and Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi. An epilogue looks at the relationship of the court with its neighboring Islamicate states, followed by a brief conclusion.
Both Nair and Lefèvre have written meticulous works of scholarship that considerably deepen our understanding of Mughal South Asia in the early seventeenth century. Both succeed in introducing complexity into a period that has tended to fall into the shadows of hypostatized interpretations of the reigns of Akbar and Aurangzeb. If overarching syntheses of the period are still to be developed, these works will make a major contribution to their formulation.
