The Persianate was not the only cosmopolitan tradition that flourished in the Mughal period. More than any of the Indian sultanates that preceded them, the Mughals staked their claims to sovereignty by engaging with Sanskrit literary traditions. By appropriating a culture deeply rooted in India’s pre-Persianate past, they saw themselves as Indian kings and wished to be seen as such by others. It is therefore hardly surprising that both Brahmin and Jain scholars maintained a significant presence in the Mughal court in the latter decades of Akbar’s reign and continuing through those of Jahangir and Shah Jahan.29
Such a policy did have precedents. In fifteenth-century Kashmir Sultan Zain al-‘Abidin had patronized the production of successive local histories, the Rajataranginis, by the Sanskrit writers Śrivara and Jonaraja. But Akbar and Jahangir made more significant moves in this direction, ordering some fifteen Sanskrit works to be translated into Persian, which enabled court literati unfamiliar with that language to engage with Sanskrit thought.30 Meanwhile, Jain and Brahmin intellectuals who served in the Mughal court as astrologers, translators, religious guides and political negotiators inevitably drew the Mughals into their own world. Padmasundara (fl. 1569), an early Jain visitor to the imperial court, accommodated the Mughal world to Sanskrit literary theory and placed Akbar at the centre of Sanskrit aesthetics. The Jain monk Śanticandra (fl. 1580s) mapped the Mughal empire on to the topography of a timeless India as imagined in Sanskrit literature, portraying Akbar as a Jain king and his military exploits as a classically Indian ‘conquest of the quarters’ (digvijaya).31 In the late sixteenth century Akbar commissioned Vihari Krsnadasa to write Parasiprakaśa, which was both a thesaurus-like list of common words in both languages and a Sanskrit grammar of Persian in which the author aimed to explain Persian to Sanskrit intellectuals.32
Among such inter-cosmopolitan projects, the most ambitious were the court-commissioned Persian translations of the great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which Akbar sponsored from the 1580s. Here the overriding effort was to emphasize the epics’ political character and to accommodate Indian deities to Persianate sensibilities. Thus, a translation of the Ramayana was refashioned into a meditation on Mughal sovereignty, associating Akbar with the epic’s hero, Rama, and suggesting that the emperor was an incarnation of Vishnu.33 A translation of the Mahabharata, entitled Razm-nama, preserved hundreds of Sanskrit words, Indian imagery, avatars and Indian deities while conveying the idea of a monotheistic deity, identifying Brahma with the generic Persian term for ‘god’ (khudavand). The epic’s most specifically religious section, the Bhagavad Gita, occupies just a few pages of the Persian translation, in contrast to 700 pages of the Sanskrit text.34 Rather than adhering to the Sanskrit text’s emphasis on establishing cosmic and social order (dharma) in the world, the Persian translation emphasizes the proper virtues of the king. In his preface to the translation, Akbar’s principal spokesman Abu’l-fazl framed the work within the kingly advice genre of classic Persian literature. His brother, the court’s poet laureate Fayzi, went further, transforming parts of the Mahabharata into Persian literature, even poetry. The Iranian immigrant Muhammad Tahir Sabsavari, who was active at the courts of Akbar and Jahangir, included another version of the Mahabharata story in his universal history Rauzat al-Tahirin, assimilating the Indian epic into a wider history of the human race and linking the Mughals with India’s ancient kings.35
Among all spheres of culture, it was perhaps in the sciences that knowledge passed most freely between the Persianate and Sanskritic worlds. In the field of medical theory, Greco-Islamic doctrines inherited from the Persian polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) differed radically from India’s Ayurvedic tradition regarding the number and nature of bodily humours. But the fourteenth-century Indo-Persian scholar Shihab al-Din Nagauri, whose treatise on the subject circulated widely among both Hindu and Muslim physicians, sought to reconcile these differences by assimilating Ayurvedic understandings of physiology into the Avicennian framework. Most Persian writing on Indian medicine, however, focused on practice, not theory. Since the Avicennian tradition had evolved in the dry Middle Eastern environment, many diseases and therapies integral to that tradition were not relevant in wetter, tropical India. This required Indo-Persian physicians and scholars to engage closely with Sanskrit works on pharmacology and native Indian plants. By ‘Alamgir’s reign, Avicenna’s theories had become Indianized as Hindus who had learnt Persian engaged with them. At the same time, Ayurvedic medicine became Persianized as it gained influence in the courts of the Deccan and north India.36
Interaction between Indic and Persianate views on astronomy also gathered momentum in the Mughal age. If Indo-Persian writers had taken the initiative accommodating Indian medicine to Persian medical theory and practice, with astronomy the reverse was the case. In the Mughal period Brahmin pundits – not without considerable controversy among themselves – gradually assimilated Greek models of planetary movements as originally formulated by Aristotle, Euclid, or Ptolemy, and as refined and mediated by medieval Arabo-Persian scientists. Prominent among the latter was the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din Tusi, who persuaded his Mongol overlords to support the construction of a massive observatory at Maragheh (1259), in north-west Iran, together with a library and teams of scholars, to test Greek principles against empirical observation. In 1429 Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg (d. 1449), built another such observatory in Samarqand, modelled on that at Maragheh. He, too, assembled teams of scholars who in turn tested, wrote commentaries on, and refined the astronomical theories of Tusi and other Arabo-Persian scientists. The assimilation of these ideas by Indian scholars, however, was slow. One problem was the smugly insular stance of Sanskrit scientific literature which, refusing to recognize the authority of non-Indian science, remained for centuries wilfully ignorant of its competitors. There were also profound differences over cosmology. The medieval Arabo-Persian tradition, following the ancient Greeks, believed in the uniformity of nature over time and space, whereas the classical Indian view saw the universe as decaying over time. Moreover, Greco-Islamic physics assumed that planets move by Aristotelian ideas of natural motion, whereas Indian cosmology postulated planetary movement by material forces such as wind or demons. Finally, any transmission of ideas required proper dictionaries, and the first Persian–Sanskrit dictionary only appeared in the late sixteenth century, with Krsnadasa’s Parasiprakaśa. In 1643 Shah Jahan patronized the compilation of another dictionary with the same title.37
Thanks to such dictionaries, and the patronage of Brahmins and Brahmanical knowledge at the Mughal court, the self-imposed walls of Brahmanical orthodoxy regarding astronomy began to crack. In 1628 the first pundit to absorb Arabo-Persian astronomical influence, Nityananda, translated from Persian into Sanskrit the tables that had been prepared for Shah Jahan predicting the location and movements of the planets. These tables were based on those prepared by Ulugh Beg in fifteenth-century Samarqand, which in turn had built on those of Nasir al-Din Tusi in thirteenth-century Iran. In 1639 Nityananda composed another Sanskrit translation in which, in order to gain its acceptance by orthodox Brahmins, he offered the pretext that the Arabo-Persian astronomy it contained had been derived from the revelation of an Indian deity.38 Despite such camouflage, the work led to fierce disputes in Benares, the bastion of Brahmanical learning, which split into opposing camps over the compatibility of Arabo-Persian astronomy with received Indian tradition. One camp was led by Kamalakara, who in 1658 authored a Sanskrit treatise that agreed with the Ptolemaic notions of the structure of the planetary system as confirmed by the observations at Ulugh Beg’s observatory.39 Although his ideas were vigorously opposed in some quarters of orthodox opinion, by ‘Alamgir’s reign Persianate notions of astronomy had stimulated considerable intellectual ferment in Sanskrit circles, forcing scholars either to defend, modify or reject their inherited tradition.
Ulugh Beg’s observatory in Samarqand also inspired Jai Singh II (r. 1700–43), the Rajput raja of Amber and high-ranking Mughal mansabdar, to build a number of his own observatories, including those in Delhi and Jaipur, the eponymous capital city he founded. Unlike the pundits at Benares, who were divided over the acceptability of non-Indian astronomy, Jai Singh enthusiastically studied Brahmanical and Perso-Arabic systems and patronized scholars of both traditions at his court. In Jaipur between 1728 and 1732, just as Mughal central authority was dissolving and provincial governments were assuming de facto independence, a Persian scholar collaborated with a Brahmin pundit in translating the works of Tusi, Ptolemy and Euclid from Persian or Arabic into Sanskrit, through the medium of their common tongue, Hindavi.40 Jai Singh himself wrote texts on astronomy in both Persian and Sanskrit, and his direct observations led him to modify astronomical calculations of Ulugh Beg, his Timurid predecessor.41 Although the raja’s modifications of Perso-Arabic astronomical theory hardly represented a scientific breakthrough, his close engagement with Persianate science is nonetheless impressive, as is the stunning effect of his observatories, with their sweeping curves, on the landscapes of Delhi and Jaipur.