Culture of Encounters

Title: Culture of Encounters – Sanskrit at the Mughal Court

Author: Audrey Truschke

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9780670088942

Pages: 362

 

India’s language and culture underwent great changes during the six hundred years of Islamic invasions and occupation. An oligarchy attached to the rulers and who had no roots in the country subjected it to autocratic rule. Earlier, Sanskrit served as the link language on its position as the primary medium of literature all over the subcontinent. With the advent of the Sultanate and later Mughal dynasties, Sanskrit fell from grace. The sultans co-opted Persian as the court language. After Mughal power was consolidated during Akbar’s reign, he looked for ways to establish post-factual legitimacy by understanding and assimilating traditional royal claims to the throne. With this requirement in mind, they translated epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata and a few other works into Persian. This book is a case study of how the Mughals engaged with Sanskrit texts, intellectuals and ideas and how Sanskrit scholars responded to and participated in this demand for Indian stories, practices and philosophies. It deals with Sanskrit at the Mughal court from 1560 to 1660 CE, that is, from the reign of Akbar to Shah Jahan. A few minor works are artificially enlarged to match with the author’s high assessment of its worth and impact. The book also accepts that Sanskrit tradition collapsed entirely by 18^th century. Audrey Truschke is an assistant professor of South Asian History and is the author of two controversial works on Indo-Islamic interactions. Her book on Aurangzeb had received much criticism in its dishonest handling of descriptive sources to paint the bigoted sultan in an admiring light.

 

Akbar declared Persian as the official language of his empire in 1582. Even before this event, Mughal court had extended lavish patronage that attracted Persian poets, thinkers and artists from across Asia. With this virtual takeover by a foreign tongue, little space was left for Indian languages. However, Akbar sensed the disconnect this move had engendered with the numerically majority community of India. With this in mind, he initiated links with the Sanskrit tradition that were concentrated around the central court. Akbar sponsored the translation of many Sanskrit texts into Persians, hosted dozens of Jain and Hindu Sanskrit intellectuals at court and hired Sanskrit-medium astrologers. Initial Mughal engagement with Sanskrit was about music and dance. Akbar very much enjoyed Indian performance traditions. However, the favourite theme of court poetry centred on eroticism. The title of one such treatise if ‘Akbar Shahi sringaradarpana’ (mirror of erotic passion for Shah Akbar). This book devoted bulk of its attention to the erotic mood and typology of heroines. Mughals were voracious readers of such concepts in other languages like Hindi, Arabic and Persian too. Such were the subject matter of original books composed during this period.

 

The Sanskrit intellectuals in Mughal court were not solely interested in translation or helping Persian scholars gain insight into Indian treatises by explaining their meaning in the vernacular language. Truschke claims that Hindi had become the most common vocal language of the palace. Perhaps she means Urdu, as the Braj Bhasha was still not used by Muslim aristocracy. The Indian scholars also managed to gain a few meager political concessions due to their proximity to the sovereign. Jain monk Hiravijaya elicited from Akbar a prohibition of animal slaughter during the Jain festival of Paryushan. Similarly, a punitive tax on Hindu pilgrims visiting Varanasi and Prayag was rescinded for a while. But it seems that nobody took these prohibitions seriously and nothing changed on the ground as we see Jahangir reissuing the same injunction a quarter century later. Their position at court was not secure either, depending solely on the whim of the emperor. Mughals occasionally grew suspicious of the Jain doctrine as harbouring atheistic notions. Atheism was such a serious offence to Mughal sensibilities that even Akbar was not prepared to countenance it. Jahangir banished all Jain monks from the empire and stopped the stipend of his Jain court scholars by 1620. Some scholars moonlighted as court performers. Kavindracharya Saraswati and Jagannath Panditaraja were renowned Hindi singers as well. The author claims that development of vernaculars led to the gradual eclipse of Sanskrit.

 

The book displays the entire spectrum of Sanskrit literary work other than translation of epics in the time of Akbar and translation of philosophical texts like Upanishads commissioned by Dara Shukoh, a truly India-minded Mughal prince. Other genre included hagiographies such as Allopanishad (Upanishad of Allah) penned in the Vedic style on Akbar’s own request. This work alluded to Akbar’s status as a prophet. The vassal rulers imitated the fashion in the central court in the form of sending Sanskrit praise poems to the Mughal court. Rudrakavi, a Deccani king’s courtier, created panegyrics for Jahangir, his brother Danyal and son Khurram - later Shah Jahan. The rulers did not understand Sanskrit, but these were primarily intended as gifts rather than a literary article to be read and understood.

 

This book is the product of a clever agenda to present the period of Islamic occupation of India as something beneficial and benevolent to India’s culture. The very need for such highly organized and heavily financed high-decibel campaign provides the answer to the question of how it affected Indians. Through the translation of Indian texts into Persian, the Mughals had had some definite plans in motion. The translators often bitterly complain about their unsavoury task in having to handle a religious text of the unbelievers. Akbar had Mahabharata translated into Persian as Razmnamah (Book of War). Mulla Shiri, a translator in the project, characterized the book as ‘rambling, extravagant stories that are like the dreams of a feverish, hallucinating man’ (p.110). Abul Fazl was instructed to write a preface to the Mahabharata against his will. So, he remarked in the preface that the translation is intended to bring the religious texts in a clear, expressive language intelligible beyond elite circles, so that simple believers would become so ashamed of their beliefs that they will become seekers of truth (Islam) (p.131). Badauni refused outright to write a preface to his own translation of the Ramayana, denoting it to be a ‘rotten, black book’. Badauni even writes out the Islamic profession of faith in the translation and begs Allah to forgive him for translating a ‘cursed book’ (p.138). The content of the texts were also altered to suit the need. Praises of Akbar were made to come out of the mouths of the heroes of epic poems! The Islamic god was inserted into a supreme position in the Mahabharata translation and Hindu gods were preserved as mere intermediaries between humans and Allah. This is replicated in the Ramayana translation also. The Bhagavad Gita is condensed into a barebones sketch of the conversation, eliminating most of the source version’s abstract reflections and philosophical concepts.

 

The book is replete with gross exaggerations and conclusions disproportionate in magnitude to the available evidence. Just because the Mughals had encouraged a few intellectuals whose number can be counted on the fingers of our hands, it does not mean that Sanskrit was a part of the Mughal cultural milieu. Truschke then makes a leap of wishful thinking and claims that this suggests a multicultural imperial context. In fact, the real seeds of development of Indian culture grew outside the Mughal court, often in fear of royal oppression. Persian court texts very rarely mention the Indian scholars or if at all, portray them as marginal figures of no consequence. Only Hindus and Jains developed bilingualism by learning Persian while even Indian Muslims did not study Sanskrit. Other than classical works, only very insignificant books were produced after nearly a century of ‘encouragement’ and very few copies survive in manuscript form. Glimpses of Truschke’s pet program of glorifying Aurangzeb’s hate-filled actions are seen in this book also. His withdrawal of encouragement to Sanskrit is described as ‘a sensible political act’ in view of his rivalry with Dara Shukoh. Oxymoronic statements like ‘Sanskrit was an undeniable part of Mughal court culture, and yet the language itself remained grammatically inaccessible’ betray the lack of careful analysis of facts. Readers also encounter pompous statements like ‘I stand on the shoulders of many giants in shaping this book’ undeservedly presuming that this is a masterpiece. Last time we heard this statement was from Isaac Newton commenting on his ground-breaking discoveries on gravity and calculus.

 

The author repeatedly stresses on the term ‘multicultural’ to characterize the Mughal court. In every chapter, you see it used again and again as a form of conditioning the reader. A glance at the number of individuals and texts in each courtly language would expose the fallacy of this argument. The book includes a chapter on Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari which introduced Indian and Sanskrit literary concepts to the Persians in a comprehensive way. The author unduly pits the Jains against Brahmins and Rajputs by exaggerating scholarly and professional jealousies common among competing intellectuals in a royal court to the level of bitter enmity. This fight is then portrayed as moderated under the benevolent gaze of the Muslim rulers. The book is a drag on readability due to its complex formation of sentences and ideas.

 

The book is recommended only for serious readers.

 

Rating: 2 Star