The Mughals’ legacy is inextricably entangled with Persian, the dynasty’s primary language of administration and belles-lettres, and one of the dominant literary languages of India between the eleventh and the middle of the nineteenth century. However, the Mughals were quite catholic in their investment in other literary cultures. For instance, as Allison Busch has shown in Poetry of Kings (Oxford University Press, 2011), the Mughals were important patrons of Braj (classical Hindi). And, more recently, Audrey Truschke has highlighted Mughal participation in the production and patronage of Sanskrit. In an invaluable contribution to the field of South Asian Studies, Truschke explores intellectual exchanges between Sanskrit and Persianate literati in the Mughal court between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Culture of Encounters includes six chapters and two appendices.
The book’s conceptual focus is tied to three broad rubrics: contact, translation, and reception. The history of cross-cultural contact in South Asian scholarship has been a fraught question. Many older studies on India foreground the irreconcilable distinctiveness of Muslims and Hindus. History of India: Medieval India under Mohammedan Rule (1903), written by Stanley Lane-Poole (d. 1931), offers an important example of this tendentious scholarship. In its view, Islam and Persian are inherently foreign and incompatible to Indic “civilization.” Its framework is designed to highlight hostile and irreconcilable differences, and occlude similarities and interconnectedness. Recent studies such as Finbarr Flood’s Objects of Translation (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Rajeev Kinra’s Writing Self, Writing Empire (University of California Press, 2015) have forged alternative approaches to circumvent the dominance of earlier civilizational discourses. While the field as a whole has become more aware of this problematic it is still the contact between Muslims and non-Muslims that drives many studies such as the book under review. That said, Truschke is cognizant of these trends in Indological scholarship and cautions against forming a “religious-based dichotomy of Hindus and Muslims” while admitting that “talking about Hindus and Muslims is largely a modern preoccupation that does not capture early modern religious diversity as well as other, more central configurations of identities” (p. 5). Overall, Culture of Encounters participates in forming a critical lexicon that affords more nuance and is capable of recuperating and unpacking some of these vast “configurations of identities” in medieval South Asia.
Using the rubric of “contact,” Truschke traces the participation of Sanskrit literati (mostly Jains and Brahmans) who served at the Mughal court in various capacities. The book pays particular attention to how these intellectuals acted as informants and interpreters of Sanskrit, often through the medium of Hindvi (or Old Hindi, as referred to by Truschke). These encounters make up, for the author, a vibrant aspect of the Mughal court and a distinct feature of Indo-Persian literary culture. Truschke tells us that contact can also be conveyed through absence, as she examines Jain-authored Sanskrit materials in tandem with Persian accounts while interrogating the silence of Persian-language narratives on the Jain accounts. As a consequence of this contact (or at times lack thereof), Sanskrit intellectuals found themselves in a new imperial reality in sixteenth-century India and reflected on their identities and ideologies. Her category of Sanskrit literati excludes Rajputs, Hindus, and others who were integrated into Persian-speaking communities (the case of Hindus writing in Persian has been studied by such scholars as Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Muzaffar Alam, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, and Rajeev Kinra).
Through “translation,” Truschke argues that Persian-language translators, Sanskrit literati and Hindi-speaking intermediaries collaborated in the rewriting of Sanskritic (belonging to transethnic literary tradition) works such as the Mahābhārata into a new Indo-Persian epic of relevance to the Mughal imperium. The Persian Razmnāmeh (Book of Battle) participates in the Mughal fashioning and practice of power, creating “a web of associations” between the Sanskrit epic and Indo-Persian forms of knowledge (p. 111). The extended meaning of translation also guides the book’s analysis: taking the Sanskrit heritage (defined not in ethnic or geographic terms, but treated as a historically and culturally embedded tradition) and re-adapting it to the Indo-Persian environment. In its metaphoric sense, translation applies to both Sanskrit poets who composed encomia (praise poems, or panegyric) for the Mughal court (thus incorporating their genealogy into Sanskrit literary culture) and Persianate literati who set out to transform and redefine Islamicate knowledge through engagement with Sanskritic literary models and lore.
Finally, through the lens of “reception,” Culture of Encounters examines the echoes of Sanskrit literary works, demonstrating the contentious nature of canon formation, incorporating and synthesizing Sanskritic knowledge in the Indo-Persian ecosystem. Truschke studies the work of Sanskrit scholars who incorporated Islamicate texts and ideas within their own canon and strengthened the existing Sanskrit tradition of “fashioning works for Indo-Islamic courts” (p. 64). The author also considers the way Persian-language scholars comment on Sanskritic texts and examines such documents as the preface to Razmnāmeh, Aʾin-e Akbari, Persian Rāmāyans, Tārekh-e Fereshteh and Tārekh-e Rājhā-ye Dehli. These texts collectively, Truschke argues, embody the Indo-Persian engagement with Sanskrit-based ideas, a major aspect of what “constitutes the Indo part of the Indo-Persian tradition” (p. 227). The task of analyzing the Indo-Persian exegesis of Sanskrit literary culture, as Truschke points out, requires a lifetime of research. Culture of Encounters calls our attention to such understudied texts in medieval Indian historiography, previously left out due to monolingual archival scholarship, as many historians of premodern India are primarily trained either in Persian or Sanskrit.
The book’s first chapter offers a chronological and comprehensive account of Sanskrit intellectuals’ involvement with the Mughal court. Examining the encounters of Brahmans and Jains primarily in the court of Akbar (r. 1556‒1605) but also during that of Jahangir (r. 1605‒27) and Shah Jahan (r. 1628‒58), provides context for the texts that are analyzed in the following chapters. It also aims to correct the overall silence of Persian-language records regarding the participation of Sanskrit intellectuals. This chapter challenges the notion that Sanskrit was the “language of Gods,” hence Sanskrit thinkers were “disinclined to write history,” an argument made by Sheldon Pollock (in The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, University of California Press, 2006) and Muzaffar Alam (in The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200‒1800, University of Chicago Press, 2004). Sanskrit intellectuals served as musicians, religious informants, astrologers, translators, scholars, and negotiators in the Mughal court. Many documented their encounters and interactions with the Mughals. The Brahmans and Jains that sought ties at Akbar’s court in the 1560s provided the Mughals with access to Sanskrit musical systems and Indic performance traditions. The Mughals commissioned Persian treatises on modes of Sanskrit music. The role of Sanskrit intellectuals changed in later periods, however, especially with the rise of literary vernaculars such as Braj, and Mughal patronage for them starting in the early seventeenth century. Here an important point that Truschke makes is that Sanskrit intellectuals equipped the Mughals with a wealth of lexicon and traditions that dovetailed well with the Mughals’ desire to enact an Indic form of imperial rule. On the other hand, the Mughals afforded the Jains a platform upon which to negotiate their own sectarian interests (regarding, for example, royal decrees, Brahman‒Jain rivalry, and suchlike).
The book’s second chapter examines the variety of texts produced by Sanskrit intellectuals for the Mughals, primarily encomia and Sanskrit grammars of Persian. Sanskrit boasts of a substantial genealogy of “fashioning works for Indo-Islamic courts” to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sanskrit poets hark back (p. 64). These praise poems demonstrate how Sanskrit poets worked within the Sanskrit canon in order to adapt its literary conventions to speak to the Mughal courtly culture and aesthetics. Truschke cites seven praise poems composed between 1587 and 1641. Some of these poems were commissioned by local Indian courts and were later presented to the Mughals. Since Akbar did not know Sanskrit, he would have been expected to enjoy the poems’ music and rely on Hindi intermediaries to orally translate them. Padmasundara, a Jain visitor to the court, “brings together two distinct cultural worlds” by using Perso-Arabic vocabulary and poetic practices in his praise poem while generally adhering to Sanskrit literary norms of praising Indic kings (p. 72). He further employs the Indic tradition of praising a Hindu deity to Akbar, a Muslim patron. Padmasundara recasts Akbar as an Indic king who not only engages but also enacts Sanskritic aesthetics. This chapter also considers Sanskrit-Persian lexicons, a genre that dates back to the mid-fourteenth century and attempted to understand the spread of Indo-Persian culture in South Asia. Mughals may not have had linguistic access to Sanskrit; all the same it permeated their multicultural court.
Chapter 3 focuses on the Razmnāmeh, the Persian translation of the Mahābhārata, a project sponsored by Akbar in the 1580s. The author compares the different Mughal translations with the Sanskrit source text and tries to understand the heterogeneous methodology used by Mughal translators in rewriting the Sanskrit text as an Indo-Persian epic with literary and political relevance to the court. Truschke’s comparative analysis shows how the Mughal translation practices resist any singular characterization whether it is domestication (by which the source text becomes subjugated to the aesthetic and conceptual norms of Indo-Persian) or foreignization (a method through which Sanskrit bends the grammatical and aesthetic norms of Persian). The translators used various techniques to create an epic “simultaneously foreign and familiar for an Indo-Islamic audience” (p. 111). The Razmnāmeh contained all eighteen chapters of the Mahābhārata and retained hundreds of Sanskrit words in transliteration. The Islamic monotheistic God, khodā, was introduced in the translation but did not displace any Hindu gods or spiritual suppositions. The translators preserved many Sanskrit terms for which there are near Persian equivalents but they also sprinkled many lines of poetry by Nezami, Hafez, Saʿdi and others all over the Razmnāmeh, mainly to enhance its “weight and appeal” (p. 118). These variegated techniques are anything but random and point in the direction of an intricate process by which the Mughals embedded themselves in the political imagination of their elite Indic audiences. This chapter also examines the reception of the Razmnāmeh and how it led to the expansion and transformation of the Persian genre of Persian akhlāq and political advice literature. Ultimately what made the Mahābhārata appealing to the Mughals was the mixing of political and aesthetic registers, and this is how the Persian Razmnāmeh became both a work of literature and Mughal imperial history.
The next chapter (chapter 4) examines the synthesis of Sanskrit learning in Abu al-Fazl b. Mobārak’s (d. 1602) Aʾin-e Akbari, the final portion of Akbarnāmeh (written during the 1590s), one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history that chronicles Mughal cultural and political achievements. Aʾin-e Akbari, subdivided into five books, documents different aspects of Akbar’s India. It is book 4, Ahvāl-e Hendustān (Accounts of India) that charts Indic knowledge systems to bolster Akbar’s ambition to articulate universal sovereignty. Aside from serving as a text meant to organize and articulate Mughal power, Aʾin-e Akbari also is the most “extensive Mughal exposition of Sanskrit learning” (p. 142). For instance, in his treatment of the Indian calendar (tārikh-e hend), Abu al-Fazl states that Indian time is recurring, unlike other Islamicate studies of Indian time which reported that time was divided into four repeating yugas. He then shifts his focus from the yugas to the key rulers in the “degenerate age” (Kali Yuga). This observation strengthens the overall emphasis on kingship in the Akbarnāmeh and places Akbar’s rule in a genealogy of pre-Islamic Indic kings. Overall, Abu al-Fazl’s Aʾin-e Akbari underscores that the success of the Mughal Empire did not merely rely on military might but also on articulating a coherent imperial ideology. Abu al-Fazl assumes a key role in this project by incorporating Sanskrit texts and ideas into the Indo-Persian tradition.
If chapter 4 showed how Sanskrit texts and ideas were digested in the Mughal imperial polysystem, chapter 5 is focused on the reactions of Jains and Brahmans to the way Mughal intellectuals engaged and appropriated Sanskrit knowledge systems. The most extensive accounts of the Sanskrit association with the Mughals come from Jains, especially because Brahmans were mostly reluctant to document their encounters with the court. In these writings, Truschke identifies two distinct changes in the Sanskrit canon. First, Sanskrit writers had previously not acknowledged Islam as a distinct religion or cultural tradition. Second, Jain writers revisited the “complex theological implications of endorsing relations between monks and kings” (p. 168). This section highlights that influence seldom flows in one direction; the Persianate reception of Sanskrit ideas and norms instigated, at least in part, a recasting of canonical Sanskrit practices. For instance, Devavimala, the author of Hirasaubhāgya (Good Fortune of Hiravijaya), elucidates basic Islamic concepts and terms, and in doing so presents “Islam as a recognizable religious tradition with a solid textual basis and its own vocabulary for explaining reality” (p. 171). Brahmans may not have left behind a body of texts as in the case of Jains, but they did react to the Mughals. For instance, Kavindracandrodaya (Moonrise of Kavindra) is a text that praises Kavindrācārya Sarasvati for negotiating the annulment of Shah Jahan’s pilgrimage tax on Benares and Prayag. Overall, these texts collectively demonstrate the extent to which the Mughals occupied the imagination of Jains and Brahmans. Writing on the Mughal court and customs was an opportunity to pursue political interests, establish literary credentials and forge new ways of conceptualizing the relation between their tradition and the Mughal Empire.
Most studies on the social space of Persian in South Asia have attempted to unpack the influence of Persian on India. More recently, scholars – Truschke among them – have increasingly flipped that line of inquiry to examine India’s influence on Persian. The answer primarily lies, Truschke submits, in the way Persianate writers in India have integrated Sanskrit ideas into the Persian literary canon, also the subject of her last chapter. One of the texts at the center of the Mughal reception of Sanskrit literature was the Rāmāyana. The first translation of Rāmāyana was completed in the 1580s, during Akbar’s reign. The number of distinct Persian Rāmāyans grew to more than half a dozen by the end of the nineteenth century. Cross-cultural encounters at times intensified tensions, as revealed by Badāyuni’s discomfort with the Mughal translation projects. ʿAbd al-Qāder Badāyuni (c. 1540‒c. 1615), a prolific historian and translator at Akbar’s court, translated the Rāmāyana into Persian but refused to write a Preface for it. He found the epic’s subject matter incompatible with his convictions as a Sunni Muslim. While Abu al-Fazl embraced the possibility of Indic texts disproving certain Islamic beliefs, Badāyuni perceived making these texts accessible in Persian as a theological threat. Engagement with Rāmāyana went well beyond the Mughal court. Truschke examines Tārikh-e Fereshteh, composed by Mohammad-Qāsem Fereshtah, a Deccani writer under the patronage of Ebrāhim ʿĀdel Shah II (r. 1580‒1627). Tāreikh-e Fereshteh relies on the reception and circulation of Sanskrit materials in the Mughal court, but its political concerns are at times at odds with Mughal intellectuals. For Fereshteh, Islam stands at the center of Indian history and Indians for him are descendants of Noah, and therefore originally a monotheistic people. This chapter briefly examines Chandar Bhan’s Tārekh-i Rājhā-ye Dehli and Dara Shikuh’s Majmaʿ al-Bahrayn (Confluence of Two Oceans), the latter is seen as an attempt to “show Sanskrit’s commensurability with Perso-Islamic traditions” (p. 225). Different reactions to the Mughal Rāmāyana illustrate consistent engagement with Sanskrit that for Truschke marks a distinct component of Indo-Persian literary culture.
Culture of Encounters convincingly mounts a host of historiographical interventions regarding early modern India. The most significant point this work argues is the notion that the Mughals were far more willing to extend their patronage to languages beyond Persian than hitherto realized. As a result, Sanskrit, one of the subcontinent’s classical languages, did not just disappear during the reign of the Mughals as previously argued by scholars. Here it can further be added that Culture of Encounters may have indirectly exposed another gap in South Asian literary historiography. It is widely believed that Persian was dramatically displaced by English and literary vernaculars such as Urdu in the mid-nineteenth century. However, a case can be made for the long afterlife of Persian in South Asia. Culture of Encounters also helps the reader understand both the eclecticism of the Mughal court and its roots in pre-existing cultural milieus. Unfortunately, though, readers are largely left to their own devices when it comes to the question of what Sanskrit intellectuals have gained from this exchange beyond individual assertions of authority and perhaps the personal attainment of wealth. In other words, Culture of Encounters illuminates the points of interaction but rarely shows us the limits of these interactions. The Mughals may have been catholic in their multilingual courtly culture but they also drew the line at a certain point, as evident in the number of texts sponsored for translation (18‒20 texts) and the particular genres selected for the project. The translation project, its cosmopolitan disposition notwithstanding, highlights a transactional relationship between the Mughals and their subjects, one that was short-lived and by the time of Aurangzeb (r. 1658‒1707) had run its course. This dwindling investment in Sanskrit is in sharp contrast to the continuing, ever-deepening relationship with not only Persian but also Arabic. I admit that Truschke does at times allude to what made certain texts like the Mahābhārata attractive for the Mughals but, in the end, one still comes away with only a vague idea of where the lines are drawn (rather than what was the attraction of commissioned works over other writings) by both Persianate and Sanskrit writers working in their own cultural contexts.
Comparative studies of Sanskrit and Persian are discouraged today by often-difficult linguistic requirements in US-based academic departments and a fiercely competitive job market that only pays lip service to the significance of comparative work. Given that an older generation of academic gatekeepers do not have a capacity to work between the two languages, Truschke must be commended for bringing Persian and Sanskrit in conversation with one another. Furthermore, her book offers an important model for putting literary and political history in conversation with one another, which reveals the centrality of literature in articulating and negotiating power. Particularly impressive is Culture of Encounters’ examination of works of translation. Truschke stays away from clichés and dominant metaphors of translation (for instance, betrayal and fidelity) used by translation theorists and instead unpacks the heterogeneous methods used in translation practices and how they served both immediate imperial agendas and went on to have an afterlife beyond the limits of their temporal and geographic milieu. South Asianists will undoubtedly benefit from Truschke’s endeavors. Scholars of Persian will also do well to read the book to better understand the local and transnational conversations in which Persian participated in South Asia in centuries past.
