This article presents the first in-depth textual analysis of the Razmnamah (Book of War), the Persian translation of the Mahabharata sponsored by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century. I argue that the Razmnamah was a central literary work in the Mughal court and of deep relevance to Akbar’s imperial and political ambitions. I pursue my analysis of the Mughal Mahabharata in two sections, focusing first on the work’s Sanskrit sources and then on the translation practices one finds evidenced in the Persian text. In the first section, I outline how the Mughal translators accessed Sanskrit materials and identify the Sanskrit texts that served as the basis for the Persian translation. This framework helps reconstruct the nature of the Mahabharata as the Mughals knew it and provides both the conceptual and literary tools needed to pursue comparative textual analysis. In the second section, I examine the text of the Razmnamah in comparison with its Sanskrit sources to highlight some of the Mughal translators’ key strategies in reimagining the epic in Persian. This close reading traces several literary paradigms that offer insight into the crucial role the Razmnamah played in the production and reproduction of Mughal imperial culture. Taken as a whole, my analysis argues that the Razmnamah was a crucial component of the politico-cultural fashioning of Akbar’s court, whereby the Mughals developed a new type of Indo-Persian imperial aesthetic.
From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Indian intellectuals produced numerous Sanskrit-Persian bilingual lexicons and Sanskrit grammatical accounts of Persian. However, these language analyses have been largely unexplored in modern scholarship. Select works have occasionally been noticed, but the majority of such texts languish unpublished. Furthermore, these works remain untheorized as a sustained, in-depth response on the part of India's traditional elite to tremendous political and cultural changes. These bilingual grammars and lexicons are one of the few direct, written ways that Sanskrit intellectuals attempted to make sense of Indo-Persian culture in premodern and early modern India. Here I provide the most comprehensive account to date of the texts that constitute this analytical tradition according to three major categories: general lexicons, full grammars, and specialized glossaries. I further draw out the insights offered by these materials into how early modern thinkers used language analysis to try to understand the growth of Persian on the subcontinent.
Brahmanism beaten and battered by the Muslim invaders could look to the rulers for support and sustenance and get it. Buddhism beaten and battered by the Muslim invaders had no such hope. It was an uncared for orphan and it withered in the cold blast of the native rulers and was consumed in the fire lit up by the conquerors. (BHIMRAO AMBEDKAR) 1 Scholarship on Buddhist and Muslim interactions has long featured a particular story about Islam's central role in Indian Buddhism's decline. This narrative can be summarized in a single sentence: iconoclastic Muslims invaded India, attacked Buddhist monasteries and institutions of higher learning, and in so doing destroyed the foothold of Buddhism on the subcontinent. It is hard to overstate the potency and prevalence of this story line. As Johan Elverskog has put it, "Whenever the topic of Buddhism and Islam is ever mentioned it almost invariably revolves around the Muslim destruction of the Dharma." 2 Modern academics often shy away from the more sensational descriptions of this alleged apocalyptic clash that characterized earlier, pop
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