SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Imperial Indo-Persian Treatments of Sanskrit Stories and Knowledge Systems

Charting Frontiers: Sanskrit Literary and Intellectual Cultures at the Mughal Court

Sanskrit intellectuals and texts were an integral part of Mughal court culture and informed imperial ambitions from roughly 1560 through 1650. Over the course of nearly 100 years, the Mughals actively supported Sanskrit textual production, participated in Sanskrit cultural life, and produced Persian translations of Sanskrit literature. For their part, both Jain and Brahmanical intellectuals composed Sanskrit literary works for Mughal consumption and wrote extensively about their imperial experiences. Yet the social, political, and literary dynamics of Sanskrit at the Mughal court remain a largely untold story in modern scholarship. I use a variety of Sanskrit and Persian texts to reconstruct these largely forgotten cross-cultural interactions. I further argue that imperial engagements with the Sanskrit tradition are critical to understanding the construction of power in the Mughal Empire and the cultural and literary dynamics of early modern India. More broadly, I aim to contribute to the active rethinking in many fields concerning how to analyze cross-cultural phenomena, the internal dynamics of literary traditions, and multicultural empires.

Event Series

• 16 April: Rewriting the Social History of the Multicultural Mughal Court
• 17 April: Sanskrit Textual Production for the Mughal Elite