When considering the pre-colonial evidence in such fields as architecture, art, language, literature, religion or the sciences, one might ask whether the Sanskritic universe had assimilated its Persianate counterpart, or whether it had been the other way around. But perhaps the question is misplaced. At the moment of their initial encounter, to be sure, each literary tradition and the fields it elaborated were mutually opposed in nearly every respect. That was certainly how it seemed to the eleventh-century Persian polymath Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (d. 1048), who registered one of the most thoughtful and articulate responses to the Sanskrit world ever voiced by an educated Persian. Having travelled extensively in north India, learnt Sanskrit and immersed himself in the study of all aspects of Indian culture, Biruni wrote a comprehensive survey of Indian knowledge, Kitab ta’rikh al-Hind, at the dawn of the encounter between the Persianate and Sanskritic worlds. The book’s very first chapter emphasized the stark opposition he perceived between the Indian scholarly and cultural universe and his own, which had synthesized Greek, Arabic and Persian intellectual traditions.42 And yet already in 1027 Biruni’s own patron, Mahmud of Ghazni, minted coins bearing a Sanskrit translation of the Islamic confession of faith in which the Prophet Muhammad was presented as an avatar of God, translated as avyaktam, ‘the Unmanifested’.43 By using Sanskrit terms that roughly approximated the meaning of the Arabic, Mahmud was already blurring two very different theological spheres.
Six hundred years later, however, the process of mutual acculturation had proceeded to the extent that many ordinary Indians reflexively combined these worlds in their ritual practices. In the early seventeenth century, Jahangir noted that ‘crowds on crowds of the people of Islam’ travelled long distances to bring offerings and pray at the stone image in the temple of Bajreśwari Devi near the Kangra fort in present-day Himalchal Pradesh.44 In the same century, it was natural for educated elites to view India’s history and material culture through the prism of universal kingship, rather than that of specific religions. Chandar Bhan’s seventeenth-century history of the kings of Delhi seamlessly connected the Mughals and Delhi sultans to their north Indian royal predecessors, something Biruni could never have imagined.45 Shortly after 1596 Bijapur’s ambassador to Ahmadnagar, the Iran-born Rafi‘ al-Din Shirazi, visited the famous rock-cut temples and monasteries at Ellora in the north-western Deccan. Comparing the site to the palaces of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of ancient Persian emperors that he knew from having grown up nearby, Shirazi viewed Ellora’s monuments as a past record of dynastic royalty, the same way that Chandar Bhan perceived Indian history. Accordingly, the ambassador understood the Kailash Temple to be a monument depicting the court life of some ancient Indian king, and its statue of Śiva to be a stone portrait of a royal figure.46
Works of architecture and literature also reflect the extent to which, from the late sixteenth century onwards, the Persianate and Indic cultural spheres lost the stark polarity that had seemed so obvious to Biruni. The kingdom of Orchha had been a tributary state of the Mughals since the 1570s. As a Rajput chief assimilated into the Mughal ruling class, Orchha’s ruler, Bir Singh, lavishly incorporated Indo-Timurid, Vaishnava and Rajput motifs into the monuments he patronized, such as the Keśavadeva Temple in Mathura or the Jahangir Mahal in Orchha itself. Meanwhile, Akbar’s alliance with Rajput houses, and the presence of high-ranking Rajput women in the Mughal harem, had brought the dialect of Hindavi spoken in the region south of Delhi – Brajbhasha (or Braj) – into the heart of the imperial court. By the late sixteenth century, both Hindu and Muslim poets of Braj enjoyed Mughal patronage.47 A pivotal figure in this movement was Bir Singh’s court poet, Keshavdas (fl. 1580–1612), who, instead of writing in Sanskrit as his ancestors had done, pioneered a refined, courtly style of Braj that incorporated protocols and genres from classical Sanskrit literature.
As seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers of Braj literature moved from court to court seeking patrons across the Mughal realm, their dialect of Hindavi became increasingly cosmopolitan in nature. And since courtliness in India was largely an imitative behaviour, courts naturally responded to what other, higher-status courts were doing. So when the Mughals, as north India’s supreme lords, began promoting distinctive styles in domains such as manuscript painting, architecture or courtly Braj literature, their Rajput allies, who served as imperial mansabdars across north India and the Deccan, imitated those same styles.48 In this way, the Mughals’ patronage and stamp of excellence proved critical for the success of classical Hindi, meaning that the Rajput–Mughal alliance was as much a literary as a political phenomenon.49 On the other hand, the success of vernacular Braj as a literary form carried serious implications for the patronage and usage of Sanskrit. Keshavdas and his many successors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India contributed to a larger process by which Braj, by appropriating Sanskrit style, began to encroach upon the cultural space that Sanskrit had once monopolized, eventually usurping its place and rendering the classical language increasingly irrelevant.50
Persian in India would experience a fate similar to that of Sanskrit, though somewhat later and for very different reasons. Critical to this process was the reception of Europe’s ‘one nation, one language’ ideology in nineteenth-century Iran and India, and the rise of nationalist movements in both countries. In Iran, Persian was vigorously promoted as that country’s national language, for which purpose classical poets such as Firdausi were appropriated as proto-national Iranian poets. This seriously compromised Persian’s former status as a transregional, cosmopolitan medium, thereby eroding an historic cultural bridge between India and Iran. In India, meanwhile, Persian experienced a precipitous drop in patronage following the final collapse of the Mughal empire in 1858 and the subsequent rise of Indian nationalism. Unlike Persian in Iran, Sanskrit could not be nationalized since it was not commonly spoken anywhere. However, as Delhi’s economic and political importance continued to decline after the mid eighteenth century, many of the city’s poets migrated to the empire’s former provinces – Bengal, Bihar, Awadh, Punjab, Hyderabad – where they acquired students wishing to emulate the new metropolitan poetic style called rekhtah. Written in Persian script and appropriating Persian literary models, this new style was composed in the vernacular dialect of the Delhi region and evoked the lustre of the Mughals’ remembered, glorious past. In particular, it was associated with the prestige of the imperial Mughal camp, or urdu, by which name the language would be known.51
In this way, between the mid eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, two great transregional languages, which for centuries had defined the Sanskritic and Persianate worlds, became artefacts in India, eclipsed in the north by new literary genres in dialects of spoken Hindavi – prominently Braj and Urdu.52 And yet, although the patronage of Sanskrit and Persian literature and the usage of the two languages receded dramatically, the values, sentiments and ideas sustained through their respective literary traditions had become deeply enmeshed over the course of nearly a millennium of mutual interaction. It would take the efforts of later generations to reverse that process.