The study
of Islamicate South Asia suffers from being on the periphery of two fields of
inquiry, Islamic studies and Indology, and as a periphery never fully
participates in either. This is simply because the trend towards more connected
histories may have forced historians to the mine the various European archives,
supplementing the Dutch, Russian and Portuguese to the British and French, but
has yet to compel researchers to be familiar with Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit as well as various other Indian
languages – and I stress Indian since in their contexts, vernacular networks
and usages these languages, albeit somewhat elite, were very much Indian within
the multilingual semiosphere of South Asia. A more connected approach to South
Asia in the Mughal period would require precisely the skills displayed by
Truschke in her excellent recent book Culture of Encounters.
And this is because the presentmindedness of much historiography in
South Asia cannot break out of nationalist categories brought about by
partition: as Truschke shows in her more recent little monograph on Aurangzeb,
the Pakistani nationalist historian sees within the Mughals, hardy Muslim
invaders forgoing a new community of faith on the South Asian frontier, a
community that remained separate from those around and hence reached their
fulfillment in the demand and creation of Pakistan, and the Hindutvadi
historian for whom the Mughals remained outsiders who could not possibly have
seen themselves as ‘Indian’.
The very category of ‘Indian’ is essentialised in
line with a retrojection of strict boundaries of communal affiliation and
identification associated with ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’. This is not to argue for a
syncreticism in which people in pre-modern South Asia did not know ‘where Hindu
began and Muslim ended’ or for a fully fluid concept of identity or even to
deny that there was ever any conflict based on religious identification;
rather, the ways in which we articulate these two categories as identity and
conflict markers today is rather different. Religion and power interact in
rather contingent manners.
Apart for
the rejection of such essentialising categories, Truschke’s book is a
significant event in Mughal studies for a number of other reasons. First, it
marks a new trend towards a future philological turn in which researchers for
some time dazzled by statistics and more recently by fashionable European
theory have returned to paying careful attention to the text and its
possibilities; people have once again decided to take pride in their ability to
parse and carefully construct editions of texts in Persian and Sanskrit. Sometimes one might argue that the neo-philologists go too far in their rejection of theory. But they do have a point: why shouldn't we consider theoretical formations and practices of textual production and reading that emerge from those cultures that produce the text instead of doing what has become far too common in the study of religion in North America, namely taking Foucault or Jonathan Smith or Charles Pierce or someone else and reading a South Asian thinker on their terms? New philology in that sense could constitute a call to arms towards a new theoretical attitude to the text. Second,
Mughal rulers placed themselves within various traditions of kingship,
Chingissid-Timurid, Turco-Persian, Sanskritic and they did not just appropriate
Sanskrit literary culture as a mode of legitimation. Other historians looking
at the ʿAbbasids have also tended to see their ideological appropriation of
Iranian, Indian and Hellenic traditions in terms of their imperial projection
of authority. But the cultural and textual practices of the court need not
always be sublimated to the question of legitimation as Truschke stresses in
the introduction. The production of historical texts is a more complicated
process; perhaps we have become bewitched by Foucault via Said into seeing all
configurations of power, knowledge and culture as fundamentally constitutive of
ideology in which legitimation is the only language game in circulation. Thus
Akbar did not have the Mahābhārata
translated merely as a means to legitimize his authority – in the same way as
Mughal, Safavid and Timurid princes did not have the Shāhnāma of Ferdowsī copied and presented to their peers as a
simple way to connect them to this pantheon of great Iranian world emperors of
the past. Third, nevertheless, Truschke, like Moin more recently, does
represent a shift towards an intellectual historian’s approach in which the
aesthetic practices of power are taken quite seriously. Fourth, connected
history is about supplementing the modes of inquiry and approach to questions –
it is about destroying the canon and not necessarily producing another: it
requires reading Persian and
Sanskrit, and not replacing Persian with
Sanskrit. Similarly, the adoption of Sanskritic and even Vedic idioms and
projections of the self did not necessarily mean the Mughal rulers suddenly
thought themselves truly Indian as opposed to Central Asian and Muslim nor did
it entail pretense for the court elites who were predominantly not like them.
They did not necessarily see themselves as ‘ceasing to be Muslim’ or suddenly
becoming syncreticists. Even Moin’s theory of the millennial sovereign in which
Akbar, Shah Jahan and Jahangir saw themselves as being above the theological
affiliations of their subjects might not apply to all the rulers and their
allies.
Truschke explicitly located her own contribution alongside the work of
Moin, Busch, and Faruqui. Fifth, Mughal practices of power were steeped in
multilingualism and interactions. And this is not a new insight – the sources
have been available; it is just that researchers have not availed themselves of
them. It is not necessarily that new sources have emerged. Finally, Truschke’s
work complements the ongoing Perso-Indica project looking at translations of
Sanskrit into Persian. Islamicate societies were the loci for a number of such
cultural translation movements, and if, following Shahab Ahmed’s recent plea for considering the ‘Balkans to Bengal complex’, we take South Asia seriously
we cannot neglect the works and this process studied by Truschke.
The core
of the book constitutes six chapters: on Brahman and Jain Sanskrit
intellectuals – and it is striking how much of the material we have on
encounters comes from the latter – at court, on textual production for the
Mughals which mostly overlaps with the remit of the Perso-Indica project, of
the particular interest in the Mahābhārata,
of the means by which Abū-l-Fażl projected the sovereignty of Akbar (something
often located in the rather simple ‘ishrāqī’ and Akbarian paradigms by Athar Abbas Rizvi
and others), on the Sanskrit sources, and finally on how to incorporate
Sanskrit into the Persianate world. The first of these is to establish the
multicultural leanings of the Mughal elite and complicate the model of their
kingship. The second establishes the multilingual nature of the Mughals. The
third shows how aesthetics demonstrates the ways in which literary works were
used for political effect as advice literature – in that sense the Mahābhārata is similar to Yūsuf u Zulaykhā of Jāmī in its Timurid context. The fourth is one must admit rather Foucauldian in which Abū-l-Fażl
mastery of the Indian in his work promoting Akbar is very much about the
politics of knowledge, even if aesthetics mattered to those in power and not
merely for instrumentalist reasons. The fifth considers the encounter from the
other perspective and gives us an insight into Sanskrit intellectual culture
and its ties to the Mughals. The sixth shows how the Indo-Persian world (with
all the caveats one may consider of the usefulness of the term) was
fundamentally transformed by the encounter – and one thinks of various Sufi
works whether by Dārā Shikoh or ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī who could not fail to
incorporate the Sanskritic into their Indo-Persian imaginary. Along the way we
enjoy the many examples of close and deep textual reading in Sanskrit and
Persian that Truschke displays.
In her conclusion, after noting that Mughal
encounters with Sanskrit intellectual culture has been neglected for too long,
she indicates precisely some of the reasons why such a study is important and
timely. The nexus of aesthetics and power is critical and a central feature of
a recent trend in Mughal studies. Of course, the question arises: why did the
encounter come to an end? Truschke suggests two reasons – and in fact one would
wish to see more argument on this – for this process: the first was
vernacularisation and the shift from Sanskrit to Hindi (and Persian remained in
literary and more vernacular usage alongside others), and the second was the
fall in patronage under Aurangzeb and after. This might have less to do with
his infamous bigotry and more to do with the priorities of the court. Then in
the 18th century the various rivals for the Mughal legacy in a
declining empire provided multiple outlets of patronage for Sanskritic and
vernacular elites (including those dealing with Arabic and Persian) to
decentralise the process.
For those seeking where Mughal studies lies today and
its future, they would be well advised to read Truschke and heed her advice for
the directions that the field may take. And at least for this intellectual historian it is refreshing to see someone take texts and ideas seriously.
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