8f463d86-f3eb-4314-8a68-eeea7eb466df20260404114624Ubiquity Presstech@ubiquitypress.comRUA Metadata ExporterShankarNairUniversity of Virginiahttps://ror.org/0153tk833Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South AsiaDuring the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha—an influential and popular Sanskrit philosophical tale—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern scholars drew upon their respective traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.“An erudite and valuable contribution. Nair’s deep linguistic and philosophical expertise illuminates the writings of three important if overlooked seventeenth-century thinkers.” Supriya Gandhi, author of The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India“Nair exhibits a breathtaking command of languages, textual traditions, and intellectual cultures in this pioneering study of the crisscrossing of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic cultural jet streams in sixteenth-century India.” Jonardon Ganeri, author of The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700“Shankar Nair examines a pivotal work of Mughal translation and shows how it channels huge vortexes of Islamic and Hindu intellectual culture. A masterwork.” John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement“A welcome addition to the history of Hindu and Islamic interactions in early modern India, highlighting the subtleties of translation and the painstaking creation of a vocabulary important for both religions.” Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard UniversityShankar Nair is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha—an influential and popular Sanskrit philosophical tale—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern scholars drew upon their respective traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.“An erudite and valuable contribution. Nair’s deep linguistic and philosophical expertise illuminates the writings of three important if overlooked seventeenth-century thinkers.” Supriya Gandhi, author of The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India“Nair exhibits a breathtaking command of languages, textual traditions, and intellectual cultures in this pioneering study of the crisscrossing of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic cultural jet streams in sixteenth-century India.” Jonardon Ganeri, author of The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700“Shankar Nair examines a pivotal work of Mughal translation and shows how it channels huge vortexes of Islamic and Hindu intellectual culture. A masterwork.” John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement“A welcome addition to the history of Hindu and Islamic interactions in early modern India, highlighting the subtleties of translation and the painstaking creation of a vocabulary important for both religions.” Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard UniversityShankar Nair is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.04282020978-0-520-34568-3978-0-520-97575-0978-0-520-97575-0978-0-520-97575-0University of California PressCaliforniahttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/10.1525/luminos.87https://www.luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1525/luminos.87https://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/ef5299f8-ffb9-4bb6-9c7e-ef0ae7de428c.pdfhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/ef5299f8-ffb9-4bb6-9c7e-ef0ae7de428c.pdfThis chapter lays out some of the disciplinary issues that intersect with Translating Wisdom. The study is situated within recent academic literature on Hindu-Muslim interactions, while also addressing some of the challenges associated with the trilingual scope of the project: although Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian were the three truly trans-regional, pan-imperial languages of the Mughal realm, no prior English study has properly attempted to conceptualize the intersecting and simultaneous operation of these three language-bound intellectual cultures, which occupied the same space for centuries within South Asia’s borders. In light of the peculiar difficulties associated with this inquiry, this chapter formulates a method for attempting its research program.0428202010.1525/luminos.87.ahttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.87.ahttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/efb784cc-a82c-41f1-a765-cc41944ac980.pdfThis chapter introduces readers to the contexts and content of the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha and its Persian translation. This Sanskrit treatise comprises a series of philosophical narratives, articulating a brand of esoteric knowledge meant to liberate an aspirant from the world. The Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha became increasingly popular throughout early modern South Asia across a surprising array of Hindu sectarian and linguistic boundaries; the Mughal court was no exception to this trend, patronizing multiple translations of the treatise. The Persian Jūg Bāsisht was the earliest of these translations to be produced, commissioned by the soon-to-be Mughal emperor Jahāngīr (r. 1605-1627) and completed in 1597 by three collaborating translators. After reviewing this historical context, the chapter turns to the Sanskrit source text’s basic metaphysical teachings, as well as the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha’s pointedly ecumenical approach to religious boundaries. The chapter concludes with a brief glimpse at the Persian translation in comparison with the original Sanskrit text.0428202010.1525/luminos.87.bhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.87.bhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/8b75657b-aca2-4791-ae76-dca5996f9294.pdfThis chapter turns to the life and thought of the influential Hindu philosopher, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (d. ca. 1630). Madhusūdana was perhaps the most famous representative in his era of the Hindu non-dualist Advaita Vedānta tradition, recognized even by the Mughal court as a leading scholar of his day. Although Madhusūdana critically engages a large swath of the Sanskrit intellectual tradition across his various treatises, his writings hardly acknowledge Islamic thought or even the existence of Muslims, a feature of his corpus this chapter attempts to explain. At the same time, Madhusūdana was actively engaged in the exegesis of the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha, his interpretation of which would ultimately exert some influence over its Persian translation, the Jūg Bāsisht. Accordingly, this chapter surveys some of Madhusūdana’s relevant teachings connected with the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha on the topic of the relationship between the individual soul (jīva) and the divine Reality (brahman/ātman).0428202010.1525/luminos.87.chttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.87.chttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/ade4b46f-b3a8-4708-8924-aedfae5e67f9.pdfThis chapter takes up the Indian Muslim Sufi thinker, Muḥibb Allāh Ilāhābādī (d. 1648). Muḥibb Allāh was one of the foremost authorities of his day in the tradition of philosophical Sufism known as waḥdat al-wujūd (“unity of being”), a “school” of Sufi thought attributed to the Andalusian Sufi thinker, Ibn al-‘Arabī. Muḥibb Allāh achieved renown to the extent that Mughal elite repeatedly sought his audience and attendance at the imperial court. Accordingly, his formulations of Sufi metaphysics became the primary Islamic vocabulary to which the translation team would resort in order to render the Sanskrit Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha into Persian. This chapter thus surveys Muḥibb Allāh’s major writings, focusing in particular upon his metaphysics as well as his extended reflections on the phenomenon of religious diversity, this being the principal framework through which the translation team would interpret and categorize the “Indian religion” represented by the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha.0428202010.1525/luminos.87.dhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.87.dhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/59aa1364-3daf-446e-9131-5210adeb4fe5.pdfThis chapter turns to the Iranian Muslim philosopher, Mīr Findiriskī (d. 1641). Findiriskī enjoyed considerable renown in the neighboring Safavid Empire, earning a reputation, even among the Safavid emperors, as a leading expert in the Avicennan tradition of Islamic Peripatetic (mashshā’ī) philosophy. Apart from this success in his native Iranian homeland, however, Findiriskī also undertook several extended journeys into Mughal South Asia. There, he came to know of the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha and, ultimately, composed his own Persian commentary upon it, asserting numerous equivalences between central Hindu and Islamic philosophical notions therein. This chapter accordingly surveys Findiriskī’s various compositions in order to better interpret his Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha commentary, concluding with an examination of his Persian commentary translated alongside the corresponding passages from the original Sanskrit text.0428202010.1525/luminos.87.ehttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.87.ehttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/e0bec003-5354-49d3-8594-03e67f0418a8.pdfWith the pieces provided by the previous chapters in place, chapter five ushers a return to the Persian Jūg Bāsisht. Translating specific passages of the original Sanskrit Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha alongside the corresponding passages in the Jūg Bāsisht, this chapter illustrates how the translation team drew upon the various slices of the Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian traditions examined in Chapters 1-4 in order to craft their Persian rendition of the text. The Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha’s particular metaphysics, alongside Madhusūdana’s specific interpretations of it; Muḥibb Allāh’s Islamic metaphysics and framework for conceptualizing religious diversity, alongside Findiriskī’s exegesis of the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha, provide important philosophical resources for the translation team. The translators, in turn, creatively utilized these philosophical resources throughout the Jūg Bāsisht in order to render Hindu Sanskrit thought within the language of Persian Islamic philosophy. In this fashion, this chapter reconstructs both the approach and the implicit theory of translation deployed by the Jūg Bāsisht’s translation team.0428202010.1525/luminos.87.fhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.87.fhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/00c79063-ce45-46ba-a6ee-c1b137bbdc7a.pdfThis chapter reviews key findings of the study, with a particular eye to what may be more generalizable to other texts, figures, and contexts. The chapter additionally reflects upon what these early modern South Asian thinkers – and this historical case study in dialogic translation – might contribute to contemporary academic discussions on interreligious interactions. Finally, the chapter considers a current debate in Religious Studies, namely, whether and how, in light of its Orientalist and imperialist past, the academic study of religion can entertain the prospect of allowing other (“non-Western”) civilizational epistemologies a genuine place at the table. That is to say, can Religious Studies, as a field, allow space for the perspectives and methodologies of “non-Western” thinkers not merely as objects of study, but as voices and perspectives that can be legitimately learned from and dialogued with? If such a “cross-civilizational dialogue” is indeed desirable, then Mughal South Asia, it is suggested, can help model for scholars today what measures might be necessary to facilitate such conversations successfully.0428202010.1525/luminos.87.ghttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.87.ghttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/102/files/c32f2e08-e408-4fa7-87a4-efe98381db69.pdf