TRANSLATING WISDOM Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia SHANKAR NAIR Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies, established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal. Translating Wisdom Translating Wisdom Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia Shankar Nair UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press Oakland, California © 2020 by Shankar Nair This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Nair, S. Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia . Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.87 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nair, Shankar, 1983- author. Title: Translating wisdom : Hindu-Muslim intellectual interactions in early modern South Asia / Shankar Nair. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019036757 (print) | LCCN 2019036758 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520345683 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520975750 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Yogavāsistha—Translating—History. | Hinduism—Sacred books—Translating—History. | Islam—Relations—Hinduism. | Hinduism—Relations—Islam. | Mogul Empire—Intellectual life. Classification: LCC BL1111.5 .N35 2020 (print) | LCC BL1111.5 (ebook) | DDC 294.5/1570954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036757 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036758 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In grateful memory of Anne E. Monius ix C ontents Acknowledgments xi Note on Translation and Transliteration xiii Introduction 1 Religious Interactions in Early Modern South Asia 3 Terms of the Inquiry 12 Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian Intellectual Cultures in Early Modern South Asia 18 Chapter Outline 26 Chapter 1: The Laghu-Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha and Its Persian Translation 30 Introducing the Sanskrit Treatise 31 The Mughal “Translation Movement” and the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha 42 The Jūg Bāsisht Translation Team 47 A “Taste” of the Persian Text 49 Chapter 2: Madhusūdana Sarasvatī and the Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha 56 Madhusūdana Sarasvatī: Life and Times 58 Fearing the “Muslim Threat”? 65 On the Soul (jīva ) in the Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha 76 Chapter 3: Mu ḥ ibb Allāh Ilāhābādī and an Islamic Framework for Religious Diversity 85 A Sufi Philosopher of Seventeenth-Century South Asia 87 An Islamic Non-Dualism: Mu ḥ ibb Allāh’s Taswiyah bayna al-ifādah wa’l-qabūl 96 The Question of Religious Diversity 104 The Arabo-Persian Jet Stream and the Question of Interaction 116 Chapter 4: Mīr Findiriskī and the Jūg Bāsisht 119 A Peripatetic Philosopher between the Safavids and the Mughals 120 Between Philosophy and Poetry 124 A Muslim Commentary on a Hindu Text 128 The Framework in Concrete Application 134 Chapter 5: A Confluence of Traditions: The Jūg Bāsisht Revisited 142 The Arabo-Persian Jet Stream in the Jūg Bāsisht 143 The Sanskrit Jet Stream in the Jūg Bāsisht 152 Conclusion 168 From History to Theory? Possibilities for the Academic Study of Religion 175 Notes 187 Bibliography 227 Index 251 x Contents xi Acknowled gments In many ways, this is a book about collaborations—about scholars and individuals of diverse training, backgrounds, and talents coming together, whether directly or indirectly, deliberately or by chance, to accomplish some venture in learning. Though all deficiencies in this book are decidedly my own, it has been my varied and often unexpected encounters with friends, colleagues, teachers, and mentors that have made this work possible. To Professors Parimal Patil, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Anne Monius, and James Morris, I owe an especial debt of gratitude. For their guidance and training, for teaching me how to read and to think (while enduring my innumerable shortcomings), I can only express a heartfelt “thank you.” In addition, there have been many other teachers and conversation partners along the way, each of whom has contributed to my thinking and learning in far- reaching and multifaceted ways. I must thank Frank Clooney, Muzaffar Alam, Carl Ernst, William Chittick, Larry McCrea, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Jack Hawley, Supriya Gandhi, Ali Asani, William Granara, Sunil Sharma, Dan Sheffield, Michael Puett, Dalia Yasharpour, Luis Girόn-Negrόn, Anand Venkatkrishnan, and Madhura Godbole for furnishing various treasures, unlocking several doors, and providing crucial keys and supports that can continue to bear fruit over the course of a career. In addition to numerous critical conversations over the years, John Nemec, Michael Allen, and Sonam Kachru also provided speedy and incisive feedback that greatly improved the chapters to come. John, in particular, has self- lessly supported my work in more ways than I could count—one could not ask for a more generous colleague! Indeed, the hallways of the University of Virginia have afforded an uncommon wealth of counsel and hospitality: my gratitude to Chuck Mathewes, Jahan Ramazani, Willis Jenkins, Ahmed al-Rahim, Jane Mikkelson, Greg Goering, Liz Alexander, Kurtis Schaeffer, Jessica Andruss, Janet Spittler, Karl Shuve, Jenny Geddes, Peter and Vanessa Ochs, Erik Braun, Cindy Hoehler- Fatton, Oludamini Ogunnaike, Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Larry Bouchard, Mehr Farooqi, Rich Cohen, Tessa Farmer, Samhita Sunya, Farzaneh Milani, Geeta Patel, Griff Chaussée, Dan Ehnbom, Rich Barnett, and Fahad Bishara for being ever- willing to answer a question or provide a sounding board. Debjani Ganguly also provided crucial research support through the Mellon Humanities Fellowship at the Institute of the Humanities & Global Culture. My thanks additionally to the anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript, as well as to Eric Schmidt and Austin Lim at UC Press for expertly shepherding it through. To Michael and Elizabeth, Alma Giese, Joseph, Caner, Roy, Faris, Amina, Lynna, Ryan, Poojan, Susan, Murad, Alyssa, Mohammed, Wajida, Fatos, Evan, Rizwan, Latifeh, Aaron, Yousef, and Maria, thank you for the camaraderie, the warmth, the sense of perspective, and, most importantly, the humanity. And a particular note of thanks to Nicholas Boylston and Nariman Aavani, who provided not only their friendship, but also crucial access to otherwise unreachable manuscripts in Iran. I am grateful to a number of institutions in India for providing access to their archives and copies of several manuscripts vital for this project, including the Iran Culture House in New Delhi, the HMS Central Library at Jamia Hamdard, the Maulana Azad Library at Aligarh, the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, the Asiatic Society in Kolkata, and the Rampur Raza Library. I was also fortunate to receive copies of manuscripts generously provided by the Kitābkhānah-i Mar‘ashī in Qum and the Kitābkhānah-i Āstān-i Quds-i Rażavī in Mashhad, Iran. Yet none of this would have been possible without a lifetime of loving aid from my family, who have provided —I lack the capacity to qualify all the ways—through thick and thin. My mother and father have always been by my side, ready and will- ing to offer whatever support they possibly could. To my brother, thank you for the myriad discussions and advice, and for being an exemplar in more ways than you probably know. To my wife, Nirvana: this book is lovingly dedicated to you. Your boundless support, unfailing encouragement, and dedicated willingness to endure the trials of this process mean more to me than I could articulate. Your companionship has long been the muse that propelled this work forward, while it could not have been completed without your heroic patience. For your love, for your care, for your friendship, you have my unending gratitude. xii Acknowledgments xiii N ot e on Transl ation and Transliteration All translations in this book from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and other languages are my own, except where otherwise noted. Although many of the texts examined in the pages to come are, to varying degrees, literary productions, the objectives of this study, unfortunately, often prevent me from translating into comparably liter- ary English. Since the comparison of original Sanskrit texts against their subse- quent Persian renditions constitutes a central goal of this book, I have accordingly opted for a more “literal” mode of translation that generally hews more closely to the form of the source texts: it might make for inelegant English, but it permits the reader without access to all the relevant languages a better chance of appreciating the particular translational processes that this study aims to elucidate. A differ- ent book (one I hope someday to write!) could prioritize the aesthetic qualities and features of the source texts and their translations, lending itself to a different approach to translation than the one adopted here. For this study, however, the primary focus is doctrine and philosophical content, thus demanding a transla- tion style that can best maintain this emphasis, sometimes at the expense of other interests, concerns, and research queries. Several of the texts in this study occupy a fascinating space between philosophy and literature; whenever faced with the dilemma of a translation that either privileges technical conceptual clarity or else literary quality, in this study, I generally privilege the former. In a similar vein, in the arena of transliteration, there are good and compel- ling scholarly reasons for transliterating Indo-Persian in a way that reflects local South Asian pronunciations, such that, for example, the Persian transliteration of the Sanskrit “ yoga ” would be rendered as “ jog ” instead of “ jūg. ” Such a choice would far better capture the lived, local, contextual aspects of the historical events and processes at play, and I would happily follow suit in a study prioritizing such objectives. Here, however, with occasional exceptions, conceptual precision and transregional continuity is the higher priority: an Arabic reader of this book will be able to recognize how “ jūg ” is written in Arabic/Persian script, whereas “ jog, ” unfortunately, would be inscrutable. Likewise, with central philosophical terms that have a presence in both Arabic and Persian writing, I typically opt for, for instance, the Arabic-standard “ wujūd ” rather than the Persianized (or, really, “Tehran-ized”) “ vujūd ” or “ vojūd, ” since the former has a maximum chance of being consistently recognized across the various types of readers that constitute this book’s intended audience. At times, I will offer the locally Indo-Persian pronunciation/transliteration (e.g., bichchhep ) in the first occurrence, reverting to the more standardized transliteration ( vik ṣ epa ) thereafter. Accordingly, for Arabic and Persian, I have adopted the widely utilized Inter- national Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) transliteration system, with the following modifications: “ ah ” for tā’ marbū ṭ ah and “ ah ” for final “ he-havvaz ” (e.g., “ khānah ” instead of “ khāneh, ” “ khāna, ” or “ khāne ”). For Sanskrit—again, to ensure the maximum likelihood of comprehension among English-reading Sanskrit specialists and scholars of South Asian philosophy—I employ the widespread International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST). xiv Note on Translation and Transliteration 1 Introduction For roughly a century during the height of Muslim power in predominantly Hindu South Asia—coinciding with the reigns of the emperors Akbar, Jahāngīr, and Shāh Jahān from 1556–1658 CE—Muslim elite of the Mughal Empire patron- ized the translation of a large body of Hindu Sanskrit treatises into the Persian language. The Hindu texts chosen for translation included the Atharva Veda, vari- ous Upani ṣ ads, the Mahābhārata (particularly the Bhagavad-Gītā ), the Rāmāya ṇ a, several Purā ṇ as, and numerous other Sanskrit works, among them a popular philosophical tale known as the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha, composed by one Gau ḍ a Abhinanda. This Hindu narrative treatise, produced sometime between the tenth and fourteenth centuries CE and teaching a variety of esoteric knowledge meant to liberate an aspirant from the vagaries of the phenomenal world, became an object of such enduring Muslim interest that the Mughals (re)translated it into Persian several times. One of the earliest of these translations, personally com- missioned by the soon-to-be emperor Jahāngīr and known as the Jūg Bāsisht, was completed in 1597 by a team of three collaborating translators: the Muslim court scholar Ni ẓ ām al-Dīn Pānīpatī and the Hindu pa ṇḍ its Jagannātha Miśra Banārasī and Pa ṭ hān Miśra Jājīpūrī (henceforth, the “translation team”). The Sanskrit Laghu-Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha , alongside its early Persian translation, the Jūg Bāsisht, constitutes my central object of inquiry in this book. In particular, I aim to reconstruct the intellectual processes that underlay this translation, tracing the exchanges through which the translation team of Pānīpatī, Jagannātha Miśra, and Pa ṭ hān Miśra, working in tandem, successfully crafted a novel vocabulary with which to express Hindu Sanskrit philosophical ideas in an Islamic Persian idiom. In the process, I argue, these Hindu and Muslim translators engaged in a mode of what we might today term an inter-religious or cross-philosophical 2 Introduction “dialogue.” Indeed, though recent studies have (rightly) interpreted the Mughal “translation movement” as an enterprise aimed at Mughal political legitimation and imperial political self-fashioning, hardly any work has been done to estab- lish a fuller intellectual conceptualization and context for these translation activi- ties. Accordingly, I will analyze these Sanskrit-to-Persian translations as the joint efforts of Hindu and Muslim scholars to draw upon the vast resources provided by their respective religio-philosophical-literary traditions in order to forge a new, cosmopolitan, interreligious lexicon in the Persian language. How did these trans- lators find a vocabulary with which to express Hindu, Sanskrit philosophical and theological ideas—including Hindu notions of God, conceptions of salvation and the afterlife, ritual notions, etc.—in the Islamic idiom of Persian? How did these two communities of scholars, one Muslim and the other Hindu, devise a shared language with which to communicate and to render one another’s religious and philosophical views comprehensible, not only to each other, but to any educated Persian-reader (Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise)? In short, I aim to illustrate how, through the venue of Sanskrit-to-Persian translation, early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars found the words and the means to put their respective intellectual traditions into a certain conversation with one another. The Sanskrit Laghu-Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha and its 1597 Persian translation, the Jūg Bāsisht, thus serve as a case study for this line of inquiry. The members of this translation team were each formed and intellectually shaped by a long scholarly heritage, largely tied to Arabic and Persian, in the case of the Muslim scholar Pānīpatī, and to Sanskrit, in the case of the Hindus Jagannātha Miśra and Pa ṭ hān Miśra. With only sporadic exceptions, prior to their historical encounter in South Asia, these Arabo-Persian and Sanskritic intellectual universes had matured and developed for many centuries in effective isolation from one another. Speaking only of the branches of knowledge we might now term “philosophy” or “theol- ogy,” over six hundred years of Arabic and Persian learning predate the figure of Pānīpatī, while Jagannātha Miśra and Pa ṭ hān Miśra, in turn, were preceded by more than a millennium of Sanskrit philosophical dialectics; the numbers grow only larger in relation to other branches of learning. What the translation team had inherited, accordingly, were two historically distinct intellectual traditions whose basic scholarly terms, categories, discursive patterns, and intellectual hab- its had long since been entrenched, along with all the erudite inscrutability that accompanies centuries of concerted refinement, contention, and debate over well-trodden, discipline-specific questions and academic minutiae. It was by no means obvious how either one of these intellectual traditions, laden with such disciplinary specificity and inertia, could be translated into the terminology and conceptual schemas of the other, but such was a crucial dimension of the task that confronted the translation team. Both the Arabo-Persian and Sanskrit philosophi- cal traditions, furthermore, exhibited an overwhelming historical propensity to utterly ignore, if not actively disdain, one another. Introduction 3 How Pānīpatī, Jagannātha Miśra, and Pa ṭ hān Miśra nevertheless managed to draw upon these very same intellectual resources in order to forge a kind of con- versation between the two traditions—translating the Hindu Sanskritic into the terms of the Islamic Arabo-Persian—is the broad subject of this book. In the pro- cess, the three figures evinced an approach and implicit theory of translation that was deeply and simultaneously informed by the conceptual and cultural worlds of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit thought. I thus hope to offer a multi-textured glimpse at the complex ways early modern Muslim and Hindu intellectuals co- existed, interacted, and comprehended one another’s neighboring presence within a particular historical moment of the Indian subcontinent. 1 At the same time, the fruit of the translation team’s endeavors—the rendering of the Sanskrit Laghu- Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha as the Persian Jūg Bāsisht —contributed a significant piece to the cosmopolitan Indo-Persian courtly culture that had recently developed under Emperor Akbar’s impetus at the Mughal court, a culture which aimed to synthe- size the contributions of Muslims, Hindus, and other religious groups within a unified political order. Given the increasingly strident religious conflicts, national- isms, and identity politics that we face in our present day—not only within South Asia, but globally—I would suggest that there is much to learn, both within the academic study of religion and also in our broader public discourse, from this historical case study of dialogue-fashioning between two religious civilizations. Before jumping into this study proper, however, a number of preliminaries are in order. Most readers will find some portion of the following rudimentary, but hardly any, I suspect, will be familiar with all or even most of it. Since, for a study of this nature, I cannot presume a common background on the audience’s part—most Hindu-studies readers will be unfamiliar with Islamic studies, and vice versa—I hope the reader will bear with the long, perhaps tedious prelimi- naries that occupy much of the remainder of this introduction, as it is important background for the story I aim to tell in this monograph and the logic of my inter- vention. Chapter 1 will then turn to the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsi ṣṭ ha and Jūg Bāsisht in closer detail. R E L IG IO U S I N T E R AC T IO N S I N E A R LY M O D E R N S O U T H A SIA Recent academic literature has done much to illuminate the broad variety of ways and contexts in which South Asian Hindus and Muslims have histori- cally interacted. Though approaching the topic through an array of lenses and methodologies, a common trend that pervades much of this literature is a repeated and persistent critique of earlier generations of nationalist South Asian histori- ography, wherein the entire premodern history of Hindu-Muslim relations is understood as a sequence of events ineluctably treading towards the India-Pak- istan Partition of 1947. As Carl Ernst explains the issue: “[t]he main distorting