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

Truschke, Audrey

doi:10.1007/s10781-012-9163-2

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…This was only a part of a larger pattern of inter-religious translations that flourished under the Mughals, ranging from a Persian rendition of the Bhagavad Gita to the Dabistān-i Mazāhib ('School of Sects') that in 1655 attempted to compile information on all of the religions of the Mughal realm. 83 Around the same time in China, the so-called 'Han Kitab' corpus evolved in an attempt to render Islam comprehensible in the conceptual and linguistic terms of Confucian Chinese. 84 Yet both ventures were the longcultivated fruit of centuries of coexistence, and gradually evolving bilingualism (and biliteracy) within specific imperial polities, and not the sudden flowering of short-lived, solitary connections, such as Zaman's chance bibliographical encounter in the house of a Jesuit acquaintance in Delhi.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Matteo Ricci as an Islamicate informant. Two moments of connection in the Persian afterlives of a Latin account of China

Green

2023

JRAS

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Three centuries after the Mongol-era historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318) wrote his influential account of China, an émigré Christian convert from Islam translated Matteo Ricci's book on China into Persian in Mughal Delhi. In doing so, he provided a remarkably detailed depiction of the rulers, religions, and regulations of the Ming empire that greatly updated, and superseded, Rashid al-Din's celebrated account. Nonetheless, by the very virtue of its triangulated origins—between China, Europe, and India; between Chinese, Latin, and Persian—this was a fraught endeavour. For Chinese cultural traditions had to be rendered into Islamicate Persian terms that were approximate equivalents for Latin Christian terms which themselves inevitably misrepresented Confucian terms that in turn provided biased depictions of Buddhist and Daoist beliefs. By looking at two moments of the transmission of Ricci into Persian—in the early modern era of manuscripts and amid the colonial ascent of Indian print—this article uses translation as a lens through which to observe both the reach and limits of the cross-cultural connections that have captivated global historians in recent decades.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Matteo Ricci as an Islamicate informant. Two moments of connection in the Persian afterlives of a Latin account of China

Green

2023

JRAS

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“…Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, several Sanskrit compendiums were authored to teach Persian to Sanskritspeaking audiences (e.g., see S. R. Sarma 1995;Truschke 2012). Typically, these 17 For instance, Mīrzā Khān b. Fakhr al-Dīn Muḥammad wrote his encyclopedic Persian digest Tuḥfat al-Hind (c. 1674/75) 'Gift from India' on the 'current Indian sciences' (ʿulūm-i mutadāwila-yi hindiya) during the reign of Mughal Emperor Awrangzīb ʿĀlamgīr (r. 1658-1707).…”

Section: Sanskrit Manuals On Learning Persianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Persian Astronomy in Sanskrit

Misra

2021

Hist. Sci. South Asia

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Starting from the late medieval period of Indian history, Islamicate and Sanskrit astral sciences exchanged ideas in complex discourses shaped by the power struggles of language, culture, and identity. The practice of translation played a vital role in transporting science across the physical and mental realms of an ever-changing society. The present study begins by looking at the culture of translating astronomy in late-medieval and early-modern India. This provides the historical context to then examine the language with which Nityānanda, a seventeenth-century Hindu astronomer at the Mughal court of Emperor Shāh Jahān, translated into Sanskrit the Persian astronomical text of his Muslim colleague Mullā Farīd. Nityānanda's work is an example of how secular innovation and sacred tradition expressed themselves in Sanskrit astral sciences. This article includes a comparative description of the contents in the second discourse of Mullā Farīd's Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī (c. 1629/30) and the second part of Nityānanda's Siddhantasindhu (c. early 1630s), along with a critical examination of the sixth chapter from both these works. The chapter-titles and the contents of the sixth chapter in Persian and Sanskrit are edited and translated into English for the very first time. The focus of this study is to highlight the linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and communicative) aspects in Nityānanda's Sanskrit translation of Mullā Farīd's Persian text. The mathematics of the chapter is discussed in a forthcoming publication. An indexed glossary of technical terms from the edited Persian and Sanskrit text is appended at the end of the work.

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“…Tell quickly the original amount of his money, if you have understood the method of reduction of fractions of residues (śeṣajāti). 20 The Persian version reads as follows:…”

Section: Omissions In the Persian Versionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One would expect that the Persian version would give here contemporary measures, but it does not. It merely 20 Līlāvatī 54 ( This is rendered into Persian as follows:…”

Section: Metrologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Persian Translation of Bhāskara’s Līlāvatī by Abu’l Faiẓ Faiẓī at the Court of Akbar

Sarma¹,

Zamani²

2019

Indian Journal of History of Science

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At the court of Akbar, several Sanskrit texts were rendered into Persian; these included the epics Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, collections of fables and legends like the Pañcatantra, the Siṃhāsana-dvātriṃśikā and the Kathāsaritsāgara, and the historical work Rājataraṅgiṇī. Besides these, a Sanskrit mathematical text, the Līlāvatī of Bhāskarācārya was also translated into Persian by Akbar's Poet Laureate Faiẓī. While the Persian translations of the Mahābhārata and others have been critically examined in modern times, the Persian version of the Līlāvatī did not receive any scholarly attention, except in two minor cases. In 1816, John Taylor, in the preface to his translation of the Līlāvatī from the Sanskrit, opined that Faiẓī's Persian version omits certain sections of the Līlāvatī. In 1952, H. J. J. Winter and Arshad Mirza discussed a small fragment of the Persian version and translated 10 verses from it into English. Therefore, in this paper, an attempt is made for the first time to compare the Persian version with the Sanskrit original and to critically analyse the structure and style of the Persian version.

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

Cited by 12 publications

References 23 publications

Matteo Ricci as an Islamicate informant. Two moments of connection in the Persian afterlives of a Latin account of China

Matteo Ricci as an Islamicate informant. Two moments of connection in the Persian afterlives of a Latin account of China

Persian Astronomy in Sanskrit

On the Persian Translation of Bhāskara’s Līlāvatī by Abu’l Faiẓ Faiẓī at the Court of Akbar

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