The Mughals and Sanskrit scholars
An excerpt from eminent historian Audrey Truschke’s latest book Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, which releases next week
Scholars have often ignored the many roles of Sanskrit
intellectuals and texts in Mughal imperial life, particularly the
political dimensions of these connections. In large part, this oversight
is due to the persistent misreading of Persian court chronicles. With
few exceptions, the Mughals penned their histories in Persian. These
works provide a valuable means of accessing much of the past, but they
are carefully crafted political narratives that represent the Mughal
imperium and courtly activities in highly selective ways. Following
Indo-Persian precedents, Mughal histories only selectively recognize the
presence of languages and cultures at the royal court beyond the
Indo-Persian realm. They also project an idealized image of strong,
unwavering imperial authority that deliberately elides the consistently
evolving and threatened quality of Mughal power. In short, court
chronicles must be read as limited, politically charged documents. Such
works are tremendous resources for parsing the Mughal imperial image,
and I rely heavily on Persianate histories here. However, they are best
paired with materials from other traditions in order to produce a more
historically accurate picture of the multifaceted nature of Mughal court
culture and political power.
Several scholars have
recently drawn attention to the many ways in which Mughal power operated
that cannot be gleaned from official histories. For example, Azfar Moin
has emphasized the importance of embodied kingship for the Mughals as
expressed through performance and invocations of popular traditions.
Munis Faruqui has underscored the role of princely networks and
competition in ensuring a vibrant dynasty. Allison Busch has highlighted
Hindi poets and literature in reconstructing the multicultural
environment of the Mughal imperium. These scholars have put to rest the
old notion that written Indo-Persian histories alone tell us what was
really important in premodern and early modern South Asia. Nonetheless,
scholars have been slow to look to Sanskrit texts in order to recover
Mughal history, partially because few Mughal historians know Sanskrit
and also because modern Indian language politics dictate the irrelevance
of Sanskrit for understanding a Persianate empire.
Sanskrit
texts present a nearly entirely neglected archive for understanding the
venues and perceptions of Mughal imperial authority. In this book I
draw on Sanskrit histories of the Mughals, Sanskrit praise poems for the
ruling elite, and a wide range of Sanskrit poetry and intellectual
treatises. These works offer a myriad of insights, but no single work or
genre of materials discusses the full spectrum of cross-cultural
exchanges that took place under Mughal auspices. Accordingly, I also
regularly draw on Persian courtly and noncourtly sources and, to a
lesser extent, on Hindi and Gujarati texts. In this sense, my work
exposes the flaws in monolingual analyses of early modern India when
contacts between cultures were more often pivotal rather than
peripheral. The precise political claims that the Mughals pursued
through involvement with the Sanskrit realm are best understood by
examining specific exchanges and texts, but a few aspects of this
intersection of power and empire are helpful to elaborate. First and
foremost, Mughal engagements with Sanskrit were directed primarily
toward a narrow band of ruling elites who were considered the true
makers of empire. Individual texts repeatedly address a limited audience
that was sometimes restricted to the Mughal emperor and other times
included high-ranking members of the imperial administration. The
Mughals rarely conducted cross-cultural exercises with an eye toward
Jain or Brahmanical leaders and even more infrequently for the sake of
the Indian population at large. Legitimation theory fails to capture
this dynamic of Mughal imperial culture because it anachronistically
assumes that the relationship between the government and the people was
of paramount importance. A legitimation framework posits that the
Mughals incorporated Sanskrit literati into court life, became involved
with the Sanskrit social sphere, and commissioned translations in order
to justify their right to rule. However, I have uncovered little
evidence that the Mughals, either intentionally or incidentally, won
over any Indian communities through their interest in Sanskrit. This is
not to say that the Mughals were uninterested in gaining the trust and
loyalty of those they governed. On the contrary, Munis Faruqui has
recently shown the careful and painstaking work that such attempts at
integration generally entailed. However, what Sanskrit offered the
Mughals was a particularly potent way to imagine power and conceptualize
themselves as righteous rulers.
Above all,
encounters with Sanskrit reveal the centrality of literature in the
Mughal effort to build an Indian empire. The relationship between
aesthetics and politics was fluid for the Mughals and took different
forms rather than being confined to a set framework. Here again
legitimation theory offers a presumptive understanding of political
power that automatically subordinates aesthetic events to political
objectives and fails to accurately capture the multiple political and
social dimensions of Mughal cross-cultural interests. Rather than mere
tools of legitimation, the Mughals saw literary pursuits themselves as a
crucial part of a successful imperial formation. Aesthetics was often
deeply political in pre-modern India, a phenomenon that scholars have
also noticed in other Asian societies, such as early modern Japan. For
the Mughals, encounters with the Sanskrit cultural world offered several
promising possibilities in terms of advancing specific
politico-aesthetic objectives.
In many instances,
the Mughals sought to claim hitherto unavailable Sanskrit texts,
stories, and knowledge systems as their own. By reinventing aspects of
the Sanskrit tradition in Persian, the Mughals aligned themselves with a
literary culture possessing the deep historical roots in India that
Persian lacked. Persian linked the Mughal Empire with a larger early
modern cultural world that included Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire,
and much of Central Asia. But the Mughals also wished to see themselves
as Indian kings and pursued this desire by appropriating a culture
deeply grounded in South Asia’s pre-Islamic past. The Mughals also
adapted Sanskrit terms and ideas in order to develop new modes of
expression. In this sense, they strove to recenter the Persophone world
around the subcontinent and to create a distinctively Indo-Persian
literary culture that prominently featured interactions with the
Sanskrit sphere. In yet other cases, the Mughals encouraged textual
production within the Sanskrit tradition and thus sought to participate
in a long-standing custom of providing royal sponsorship to India’s
traditional elite. Without having a single unified agenda, the Mughals
nonetheless consistently turned to the resources of the Sanskrit
tradition as part of their multifaceted political interests.
Scholars
have denied Sanskrit any substantive literary or historical, much less
political, role in the Mughal Empire for so long that it may no doubt
strike many readers as difficult to imagine that Sanskrit was a major
component of Mughal imperial authority. But the forms and density of
imperial interactions with Sanskrit demand that we rethink the very
formulation of Mughal culture and power. The Mughals created (rather
than merely vindicated) their claims to rule through their connections
with the Sanskrit sphere, which we can best understand if we forgo the
assumptions of much Western theory regarding the justification of power.
They cultivated deep and diverse ties with Sanskrit thinkers and texts
over the course of nearly one hundred years because they saw such
activities as a central part of their political project. The opinions of
the population at large were not at stake in these engagements. Rather,
these cross-cultural exchanges were driven primarily by the cravings of
political leaders to formulate their own locally flavored sovereign
identities and narratives of power, above all for their own benefit.
This hunger for a unique political self, dubbed the “inward-turning
aspect of legitimation” by one theorist, is a phenomenon rampant across
the premodern and the modern worlds. By investigating the mechanisms of
this political behavior during the height of the Mughal Empire, we stand
to gain fresh insight into the actions of government figures both
historically and today.