A Bilingual Astrolabe from the Court of Jahāngīr

Sarma, Sreeramula Rajeswara

doi:10.1177/037698361103800105

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…118 Some of these astrologers also wrote texts for the Mughals, such as Paramānanda who composed a Sanskrit work on Indian astrology "for the pleasure of Jahangir." 119 One Brahman became a pupil of an Islamic astrologer at Jahangir's court and crafted a bilingual Sanskrit-Arabic astrolabe (Sarma 2011). Even Sanskrit intellectuals who did not primarily engage with astronomy were drawn into this realm at Mughal demand.…”

Section: Specialized Glossaries In Astrology and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian

Truschke

2012

J Indian Philos

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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 Select works have occasionally been noticed, but the majority of such texts languish unpublished.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.

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Section: Specialized Glossaries In Astrology and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian

Truschke

2012

J Indian Philos

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Setting the record wrong: a Sanskrit vision of Mughal conquests

Truschke

2012

South Asian History and Culture

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In 1589, Padmasāgara wrote the first Sanskrit account of the Mughal rise to power within a short poem titled Jagadgurukāvya (Poem on the Teacher of the World). The work primarily eulogizes the life of a Jain religious leader named Hīravijaya, but Padmasāgara devotes one-third of the text to detailing the military exploits of Humayun and Akbar. Moreover, Padmasāgara departs significantly from known Indo-Persian historiography and imagines a startlingly innovative storyline for the early days of the Mughal Empire. Through this substantial rewriting, he furthermore consistently depicts the coerced establishment of Mughal rule as engendering the flourishing of Indian cultural and religious traditions. In this article, I provide the first detailed account of Padmasāgara's presentation of the battles of Humayun and Akbar to secure their claims over the subcontinent. I then seek to understand the motivations that fuelled this particular narrative by placing Jagadgurukāvya in the context of Gujarati relations with the Mughal court, Jain religious interests and historical sensibilities in early modern India. In his account of the early Mughal Empire, Padmasāgara crafts a political vision in which history is not constituted by a set of unchangeable facts but rather by a range of potential cultural implications that can be best realized through literature. His ambitious narrative about the recent past has important implications for how we understand early modern Sanskrit historiography and its relationship to Mughal power.

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A Bilingual Astrolabe from the Court of Jahāngīr

Cited by 2 publications

References 4 publications

Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian

Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian

Setting the record wrong: a Sanskrit vision of Mughal conquests

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