Muslim Mahākāvyas Sanskrit and Translation in The Sultanates

Muslim Mahākāvyas
Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India

Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra, and John Stratton Hawley
Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780199478866
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199478866.001.0001
Muslim Mahākāvyas
Sanskrit and Translation in the Sultanates
Luther Obrock
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0003
Abstract and Keywords

In his essay on Muslim mahākāvyas, Luther Obrock studies exchanges between
the cosmopolitan idioms of Sanskrit and Persian at pre-Mughal Sultanate courts.
He introduces three remarkable texts: Udayaraja’s Rājavinoda, an encomium
that praises the Muzaffarid Sultan Mahmud Begada of Gujarat using terms
adapted from idealized representations of Hindu kingship; Kalyana Malla’s
Sulamaccarita, a retelling of both the Biblical narrative of David and Bathsheba
and the story of the jinn and the fisherman that appears in the Thousand and
One Nights; and finally Shrivara’s Kathākautuka, a translation of Jami’s Yūsuf wa
Zulaykhā that effectively transforms the Persian, Sufi-influenced masnavī into a
Sanskrit kāvya of Shaivite devotion. These works can be understood as sites of
cultural and literary encounter where poets and intellectuals experimented
creatively to secure Sanskrit’s continuing relevance in the changing literary
ecology of the regional sultanates.
Keywords: mahākāvya, Sultanate, Udayaraja, Kalyana Malla, David and Bathsheba, Shrivara, Jami,
kāvya
How does the mystical poetry of the great Naqshbandī Sūfī Abdur Raḥmān Jāmī
become a poem of Śaiva devotion in Kashmir? How is the sultan of Gujarat like
the heroes of the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata? Why would the Biblical story of
Bathsheba and David become an occasion for an in-depth study of the erotics of
the Kāmaśāstra? The contents of these three Sanskrit texts—the Kathākautuka,
Page 1 of 18
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All
Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.
Subscriber: Universitaetsbibliothek Heidelberg; date: 28 December 2019
Muslim Mahākāvyas
Rājavinoda, and Sulaimaccarita, respectively—force the modern reader to ask

such questions and to confront the role of Sanskrit in Islamicate elite culture in
north India. This small sample of surviving Sanskrit texts from the pre-Mughal
Sultanate period shows a creative and experimental literary culture patronized
in Muslim courts. Despite the evocative contents of these works, Sanskrit texts
are seldom registered in histories of the regional Sultanates, and they are rarely
used to nuance historical processes such as vernacularization or regional
identity formation. Yet in reading these Sultanate Sanskrit texts, one is struck by
the self-assured audacity of Śrīvara’s retelling of a Sufi poem in the
Kathākautuka, of Kalyaṇa Malla’s reframing of a Biblical story in terms of the
Sanskrit four ends of man (puruṣārtha) in the Sulaimaccarita, and the
superimposition of ‘Hindu’ heroes on Gujarati sultans in Udayarāja’s Rājavinoda.
Such texts have the capacity to shed much light on the creation of an Indo-
Persian elite culture in South Asia. (p.59)
In her essay ‘How to Do Multilingual History? Lessons from Fifteenth- and

Sixteenth-Century North India’, Francesca Orsini shows the necessity of looking
outside Persian and Arabic sources to study Sultanate South Asia.1 While her
article stresses the role of vernacular sources, this chapter attempts to further
her insight by introducing a small but vibrant archive of Sanskrit texts. Here I
show that a dichotomy between Indic vernacular and Perso-Arabic elite
literatures elides the fascinating role of Sanskrit in Sultanate courts. The
Kathākautuka, Rājavinoda, and Sulaimaccarita, although from different areas of
northern India (Kashmir, Gujarat, and Awadh respectively), were all produced
within a fifty-year span between the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth
century. Each text was patronized by and presented within the court of a local
Muslim ruler. Further, from the self-confident presentation of the texts
themselves it seems that each were the products of ongoing conversations about
literature, religion, and representation. These three texts invite us to rethink the
literary culture of medieval South Asia as well as the circulation of knowledge in
the Sultanate Period in terms of Sanskrit and the Sanskritic.2
The Kathākautuka, Rājavinoda, and Sulaimaccarita offer Sanskrit poetry for and
about Islamicate courts, and as such push the boundaries of what can be
expressed in Sanskrit. Each of these texts deal with specific forms connected to
Islamicate conceptions of polity or elite culture, and each must translate cultural
contexts in a more or less literal way. With this in mind, it is worth highlighting
that the Sultanate period—contrary to the conception of the ‘death of Sanskrit’
following the Turco-Muslim invasion of northern India in the thirteenth century
—did witness moments when Sanskrit literature was afforded the opportunity to
reassert its status as an elite language. In the process, however, the hitherto
circumscribed world of the Sanskritic literary imagination had to engage
Islamicate ideas, texts, and traditions.
Page 2 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
Viewing the phenomenon of Sanskrit production in Sultanate courts from this

vantage, we are left to answer several questions: how can one delineate the
contours of translation into Sanskrit in pre-Mughal South Asia? What does it
mean to produce Sanskrit in a Sultanate court? What genealogies are being
invoked, transformed, or denied to produce such works? This short chapter does
not intend to provide a thorough analysis of each of these texts, nor does provide
an overarching theory of Sanskrit textual production in the (p.60) Sultanate
period. Rather, it offers a brief snapshot of each of these three texts in order to
hint at the richness and possibilities of the Sultanate Sanskrit and to gesture
towards the benefit of Sanskrit’s integration into a fuller multilingual history of
pre-Mughal South Asia.
The Sanskrit texts left by authors working within and patronized by the
Sultanate elite provide fascinating windows into processes of change,
accommodation, appropriation, and transformation. Sanskrit as a language of
political power had been utilized and refined in the courts of medieval South
Asia for the previous millennium; Sanskrit was not just a language, rather it was
both a way of being and a way of encoding the world. As such, Sanskrit stood as
the pre-eminent vehicle of political and aesthetic orientation throughout the
subcontinent.3 The establishment of the first Muslim—and more importantly
Islamicate4—states in north India challenged the power of the Sanskrit
cosmopolis as the sole arbiter of elite culture in South Asia. After the twelfth
century not only are north Indian vernaculars established as languages of
political power in their own right, but also the Islamicate languages of high
culture such as Arabic and particularly Persian become deeply connected with
new forms of polity.
In the face of this political and cultural change, Sanskrit does not pull back from
the world of public literary production. In fact, although the neat periodizations
of colonial and nationalist historiography clearly demarcate the Sanskritic Hindu
period from that of the Islamicate Muslim, even the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries show new and innovative articulations of Sanskrit and the Sanskritic
along with an experimental attitude towards textual composition and thematic
inclusiveness. Concomitantly, although often using Arabic and Persian with their
different ecologies of poetic beauty and artistic representation, the Sultanate
courts were not impervious or unaffected by Sanskritic high culture. Sanskrit
poets sought patronage within Sultanate courts, and were sought out by
members of the political elite. The works discussed in this chapter are the
products of conversations in which Sanskritic and Islamicate ideas and ideals
influence each other, often in surprising ways. What comes into sharp focus is
the importance of translation in the cultural processes shaping the Sultanate
period.
Page 3 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
The utility of translation as a hermeneutic device has begun to be recognized by

scholars, and has been used to map the dynamics of cultural change in
premodern Asia. While much impressive scholarship has dealt with the Hindu–
Muslim encounter (two of the most (p.61) influential works being Richard
Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier and Phillip Wagoner’s ‘“Sultan
among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at
Vijayanagara’), too often it is theorized as unidirectional, propelled by dynamic
and powerful Islamicate forms. Two recent monographs, Finbarr Flood’s Objects
of Translation and Ronit Ricci’s Islam Translated, have traced cultural change
through the lens of translation. Flood stresses that the world of contact in
premodern South Asia cannot be seen in simple binaries of Hindu and Muslim,
Islamic and Indic, Perso-Arabic and Sanskrit. For Flood, works of cultural
translation are not the product of a singular moment of encounter; rather, they
are embedded in dense networks of meaning conditioned by exchange and
transference. In Islam Translated, Ricci argues that translation is a two-way
process in which both the translator and the translated are simultaneously
formed. For Ricci, the process of translation is intimately tied to religious
conversion. The Sanskrit texts highlighted in this chapter hint to another sort of
transformation: the rooting of new lineages, ideas, and stories in Sanskritic
vocabulary, patronized and approved by the Sultanate elite.
The texts of Śrīvara, Udayarāja, and Kalyāṇa Malla are products of a dynamic
culture of transmission and appropriation, in short, of circulatory translation.
With Flood, I frame these three texts as moments of textual production
crystallized within the larger context of exchange; however, I want to move the
focus back from objects to texts. With Ricci, I stress that the process is always
conditioned; however, I concentrate on elite aesthetics rather than religious
communities. Sanskrit literary production in pre-Mughal north India provides an
important voice in the multilingual world of Sultanate elite production.
The Rājavinoda
The first case study focuses on the fascinating Rājavinoda, a text that describes
a Muslim ruler in almost completely Indic terms. The Rājavinoda was prepared
at the court of the Muzaffarid sultan, Maḥmūd Begaḍā of Gujarat (r. 1458–1511),
most probably between 1458 and 1469.5 As such, it forces us to rethink both
Persianate tellings of courtly life and Sanskrit’s role in elite presentation. The
text survives in a single manuscript brought by Georg Bühler to Bombay’s Prince
of Wales Museum in 1875, from which one printed edition was made.6 Judging
by the contents of the manuscript, its intended (p.62) audience was regional-
based and elite. Styling itself as a mahākāvya (epic poem) in the colophons, the
Rājavinoda is a Sanskrit poem divided into seven chapters. It recounts the
entertainments, pastimes, and accomplishments of Sultan Maḥmūd Begaḍā.
Page 4 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
The first chapter frames the rest of the work. Sarasvatī, the goddess of speech
and learning, engages in conversation with Indra, the king of the gods, and asks
why should she return to heaven when such a ruler as Maḥmūd Begaḍa rules the
earth? Sarasvatī implies that the sultan has made the earth a paradise for the
goddess of (Sanskrit) language. The second chapter presents a genealogy of the
sultan’s dynasty, often providing fascinating Sanskritic parallels to the lives of
the previous sultans, comparing their deeds to the great heroes of the epics such
as Bhīma, Arjuna, and Karṇa. Over the remaining five chapters, the text offers
an idealized picture of Sultan Maḥmūd’s reign. He is eloquent in the sabhā, the
meeting place for intellectuals and elites, he is a world conqueror in battle, he is
a veritable god of love to women, and so forth. The tenor of this work, with its
choice of topics, its metaphorical referents, its organization, its spatial
imagination, and its sumptuary outlook is completely Sanskritic in orientation. If
it were not for the name Maḥmūd and the other Islamic names celebrated in his
genealogy, this work could be taken as a work on a ‘Hindu’ king in a fully
Sanskritized court.
So why write such an account of a Muslim king? Before beginning to analyse

Udayarāja’s work, one must keep in mind the crucial, but too often ignored
observation that the Persian histories of these regional Sultanates are written
long—sometimes centuries—after the actual reigns of the sultans that the texts
purport to describe. This insight on the limitations of Persian historiography
when dealing with the Sultanate is not new; however, still history writing on the
Sultanate tends to limit itself to only Persian (and Arabic) material.7
While the concern of the Rājavinoda is not ‘historical’, the poem places the king
(and his lineage) within an imagined space of kingship, one that makes sense in
terms of Sanskritic tropes, organization, and idiom. The king and his world thus
become subsumed into the carefully controlled and crafted Sanskritic
vocabulary of kingship and power. The very existence of a text such as the
Rājavinoda demands a radical rereading of the Gujarati sultans. Udayarāja’s
poem shows the ideological translation of kingship undertaken within a
completely Sanskritic vision of the world. In highlighting the courtly pleasures
(vinoda) of the king, Udayarāja is placing the sultan and his family (p.63)
within a well-theorized and elaborately mapped-out typology and taxonomy of
Sanskritic courtly, sumptuary, and erotic discourse.8
In her study of the Rājavinoda, ‘The Last Chakravartin: The Gujarati Sultan as
“Universal King” in Fifteenth Century Sanskrit Poetry’ (2013), Aparna Kapadia
holds that the Rājavinoda marks a terminal point, the last time during which a
Muslim ruler could be represented as a Hindu cakravartin, or a world conqueror.
Arguing that scholars such as Eaton have taken Islamicate practices as the
baseline for elite culture in the Sultanate period, Kapadia uses the Rājavinoda to
show ‘the simultaneous existence of a reverse process’ in which ‘the classical
Indic notion of the cakravartin … could be also used to accommodate a Muslim
Page 5 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
sultan’.9 Kapadia’s intervention is important in that it shows that other factors

were at play in the literary world of Sultanate courts.
However, the question remains: Leaving aside the validity of the term
‘cakravartin’, why is Udayarāja appealing to a universalized discourse of
Sanskritic kingship? Kapadia understands the work as a last instance where
Sanskrit can be used as an elite language of kingship before the rise of other
languages of political power. Rather than seeing Sanskrit as something that is
supplanted by vernaculars and Persian, I see it as taking active part in a fluid
literary ecology. That is to say, rather than as an attempt to bring Maḥmūd
Begaḍā into a ‘cosmopolitan’ Sanskrit discourse, the Rājavinoda should be read
as a regional usage of a Sanskritic political idiom that attempts to contain new
lineages and political ideologies. I see Sanskrit as acting as one possibility
among many in the fluid intellectual world of the regional Sultanates.
The idealization of Maḥmūd in Sanskrit points towards a complex world of

courtly representational practices which not only valorized a ‘cosmopolitan’
vision provided by Sanskrit, but also attempted to localize this power within the
particular historical and geographical space of Sultanate Gujarat. The political
imagination evinced in the Rājavinoda shows him first and foremost bound
within the strictures of the Sanskritic language of power. The poetic and political
vocabulary of the Rājavinoda is drawn entirely from the Sanskrit tradition: take,
for example, a verse describing Maḥmūd’s predecessor Muḥammad:
The Sun lights up the earth only (eva) by day, the moon spreads its
radiance [only] by night. The illustrious (śrī) King (narādhipati)
Muḥammad’s appearance having vigor (pratāpa) and fame (yaśas) [on the
other hand] was seen on the earth perpetually.10
(p.64)
Udayarāja illustrates quite clearly here the common vocabulary of kingly might
found throughout royal encomia in the subcontinent. Martial glory attributed to
the king uses the same word as that used for the sun’s fiery brilliance (pratāpa).
Likewise, fame (yaśas) is in the Sanskritic poetic universe a white substance,
luminous like moonlight. The hyperbole of the verse is obvious and the cliché
well worn, yet Maḥmūd’s lineage is placed within that literary imagination. This
verse is followed soon after by this comparison:
He was versed in both politics (naya) and acting (abhinaya) through the
employment of both the Mahābhārata and Bharata’s Naṭyaśāstra. Heroic in
battle and especially powerful in giving, he approached [the status of] the
world-famous Karṇa and Arjuna, too.11
In this verse, Sultan Maḥmūd Begaḍā is imagined without irony or contradiction

in completely Sanskritic terms, and being completely educated in Sanskritic
texts of politics and aesthetics. The verse culminates in the identification of the
Page 6 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
sultan with the epic heroes Arjuna (who was of course a skilled warrior) and
Karṇa (who is remembered within the Sanskrit tradition for his generosity).
Here I want to suggest that this Sanskritic vocabulary also must be

contextualized in the larger world of courtly politics in Sanskritic South Asia; the
very form of the Rājavinoda, with the telling term ‘vinoda’, meaning
‘entertainment’ or ‘leisure’. What is striking about the Rājavinoda is precisely
this focus on vinoda, which places the king in a deep engagement with the
Sanskritic sumptuary practices of rule. Udayarāja places the Gujarati sultans
firmly within the carefully controlled and constructed world of courtly aesthetic
norms, and in so doing is presenting a vision of Sultanate power informed by and
ultimately taking part in the Sanskritic ideas of kingship. Yet I want to stress
that this is not just about elevating Maḥmūd to cosmopolitan cakravartin status;
the Rājavinoda also demonstrates the suitability of Sanskrit in articulating
specifically regional elite identities.
The Sulaimaccarita
The Sulaimaccarita is a poetic work in four chapters which again brings
Sanskritic and Islamicate idioms into conversation. It retells the Biblical story of
David and Bathsheba and the birth of their son, Solomon (Sulaimat of the title).
Produced in Awadh for a noble named (p.65) Laḍ Khān, the text traverses the
Sanskritic four classical ends of man (puruṣārtha), concentrating especially on
kāma (sensual enjoyment) and dharma (righteous behaviour) before ending in an
unexpected retelling of the story of the jinn and the fisherman from The
Thousand and One Nights. Although in some ways the Sulaimaccarita shows
parallels with Rājavinoda, the experience of reading Kalyāṇa Malla’s text is
distinctly different—most obviously since the work imports its main characters
and fundamental situations from outside of the Indic milieu. This tale does not
imagine a Muslim ruler in the aesthetic space of Sanskritic rule. Rather, it
superimposes the expectations of courtly vinoda (and later dharmic expectations
of rule) on a tale from outside of the Indic sphere.
Malla himself was an expert on kāmaśāstra, or erotics, and this orientation is

clearly shown in the first and second chapters, which describe David’s desire for
Bathsheba. David’s lust becomes the occasion for a moralizing sermon on
dharma put in the mouth of Nathan, which occupies the third chapter of the
work. After this point, the Sulaimaccarita moves away from the Mosaic tradition
of David into the terrain of story literature. The fourth and final chapter of the
text translates and expands the story of the jinn and the fisherman from the
Arabic classic of story literature, The Thousand and One Nights.
In translating this story, the Sulaimaccarita attempts, in a sophisticated way, to

allow for the participation of the Islamicate in terms of the Sanskritic. While a
needed study of the contents and structure of the entire work is impossible here,
I will turn briefly to to The Thousand and One Nights in the fourth chapter and
Page 7 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
the role of story literature in Kalyaṇa’s work of translation and re-imagination.

In the story of the jinn and the fisherman, Malla finds a shared genre and shared
sensibility that can be simultaneously incorporated and adapted. In a sense,
Malla brings a story from the Islamicate world into Sanskrit and puts Sanskrit
stories into the Arabic original. Yet in the Sulaimaccarita, this becomes truly an
act of transformation as the retelling subtly positions itself within the
expectations of Indic story literature.
Here I look to Malla’s reworking of one of the sub-stories in the tale of the jinn
and the fisherman, the story of the truth-telling parrot and the merchant. He
translates:
Long ago, there lived a righteous merchant named Dhanada, generous and
intent upon the values of his own family. A certain sailor brought (p.66) a
miraculous parrot, five-coloured and vivacious, from the islands and gave it
to him. Taking him, the merchant deposited him into a fantastic golden
cage, studded with gems, and nourished him as if he were his devoted son,
possessed of all virtues, with various fruits and sugar lumps from
sugarcane. Skilled in every language and proficient in every type of
knowledge, the parrot grew and grew, delighting his keeper. His wife,
wide-eyed, was unparalleled in beauty on the earth. Rejecting her husband
(vibhu) constantly, she became the mistress of others. Constantly waiting
outside the door for her lovers, when her husband went to the shop, she
smeared a mixture of saffron and sandal as well as a paste of musk12 on
her breasts and went forth to her tryst. […]
The parrot observed the wife living like this for days and days and became
angry with her. As he (that is, the merchant) made known he was leaving
the house, the [parrot] announced what he had seen earlier: ‘O king, your
wife is an unchaste woman, a [mere] store of flattery. Day by day she
enjoys herself with other men, meeting them joyfully. Whatever excellent
young man who has presented himself in front [of her] she sees, him she
embraces, gives sexual pleasure joyfully, then sends on his way again.’
She plotted in her heart with her conspiring friends to kill the parrot who
thus was constantly making known the daily events within the household.
Once the best of merchants heard the words [of the parrot] considering
them true, he beat his wife with scoldings and lashings again and again.
Thus chastised, his wife was enraged, and perceiving a means [towards
revenge] she placed chick-peas on a stone near the parrot’s cage and
ground them with a loud sound. From above there was a sprinkling of
water on the body of the parrot. In the darkness having lit a lamp she
caused it to move [in front of him]. The parrot thought it was the
thundering of the clouds reverberating with thunderbolts; he considered
Page 8 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
the falling of drops of water to be rain; he thought the quick flashes

(paribhramaṇa) in the mirror near the lamp to be lightning. Then he said
respectfully to the merchant when he came, ‘During the night, where were
you? Were you not tormented by the rain?’
As soon as he had said ‘There was so much rain last night!’ [the merchant]
said to the bird: ‘Parrot, what’s this rain falling in the night? Tell me, right
away! Today you have become a liar—your speech has been found out! Just
so you must have spoken previously too, alas, always about my wife!’
Once he spoke thus, the merchant, the ends of his eyes reddened with
anger, then, seizing a stick, struck the parrot in a rage. After he killed the
parrot without reflection, he saw the behaviour of his wife, (p.67) and
afterwards, tortured, the merchant remembered the parrot with constant
lamentations, and was killed by regret (cintā).13
I have chosen to translate this story at length since the story of the parrot and
the merchant receives one of the longer retellings in the Sulaimaccarita—it
seems that Malla found it especially compelling. We can see parts that Malla
focuses on and others that he elides. For instance, in contrast to The Thousand
and One Nights, Malla places greater emphasis on the fantastic nature of the
parrot and the promiscuity of the wife. The Sanskrit text also does not mention
the killing of the wife’s paramour. Yet these small differences are not the point;
rather, I think this translation shows the ease with which one can move from the
Islamicate original into the Sanskritic translation. Malla’s story in the last
chapter of the Sulaimaccarita shows the possibility of equivalence. Although
taken from the Islamicate tradition, the story feels completely Sanskritic in its
tone and telling.
The Sulaimaccarita allows in a sophisticated and experimental way for the

participation of the Islamicate in the Sanskritic. The final chapter of the
Sulaimaccarita points to an intellectual milieu in which two traditions of story
literature could coexist and interact in a congruent vocabulary of the story. In
the case of Malla’s retelling, it is clear that the Sanskrit text was cognizant of
certain markers of both Sanskritic and Islamicate norms, and he worked
creatively with these markers that defined and distinguished the two. In the end,
the Sulaimaccarita presents characters, ideas, and stories made Sanskritic.
While the story of David and Bathsheba is defined and shaped by ideas of
dharma and kāma, Malla finds in The Thousand and One Nights a common idiom
to expand on and explore in his Sanskrit retelling.
The Kathākautuka
The final text to which I turn is the startling and little-studied translation of
Jāmī’s Persian masnavī Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā into Sanskrit verse. Paṇḍit Śrīvara,
who was a court historian and musician to a number of Kashmiri Shāhmīrī
rulers, offered this text to Sultan Muḥammad Shāh in the spring of 1505. The
Page 9 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
Kathākautuka is based on Jāmī’s skillful telling of the story of Yūsuf (the Biblical
Joseph) and Zulaykhā (Potiphar’s unnamed wife). Drawing on Yūsuf’s story in
the twelfth sūra of the Qur’ān, Jāmī transforms it into a stunning meditation on
beauty and devotion to God. Jāmī’s Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā offered a (p.68)
compelling poetic and religious vision and quickly moved throughout the
Persianate and Islamicate world, eventually coming to the attention of Paṇḍit
Śrīvara in the valley of Kashmir.14
Śrīvara’s translation of Jāmī’s poem is audacious, ignoring or explicitly excising

certain Islamic elements (including the bismillah, the opening religious
invocation) while actively turning Jāmī’s Sūfī text into a poem of religious
devotion to Śiva. Śrīvara’s strongly stated Śaivism does not spring from an
ignorance or avoidance of the religious philosophy contained in the original; his
translation is not a religious polemic. He is well aware of the Persian version and
its cultural context; indeed, some verses are almost exact translations of Jāmī’s
stanzas. To drive home Śrīvara’s proficiency, the colophons after each chapter
refer to Śrīvara as yavana-bhāṣā-pāraṅga (having gone to the far shore of the
language of the Yavanas). Yet, despite—or perhaps because of—his knowledge of
Jāmī’s language and the expectations of Islamicate poetry and religion, he makes
striking translational choices. While he states, hearkening back to Somadeva’s
Kathāsaritsāgara, that he is adhering closely to the original text, changing only
the language of its expression, in actuality he moves the text from a Persianate
and Islamicate context to a Sanskritic (particularly Kashmiri15) and Śaiva
orientation. One example offers some insight into Śrīvara’s translational
strategies.
Joseph’s beauty is his main characteristic in the Qur’ānic version of the

narrative. Jāmī picks up and amplifies Joseph’s beauty, creating a striking
inversion of usual Sūfī (and for that matter Sanskritic) gendered roles. Joseph is
the male beloved who pushes the female lover towards union with God.
Throughout Jāmī’s tale, the mere sight of Joseph pushes men and women (but
usually women) into states of wonder and lust. Such moments are occasions for
Joseph to counsel his audience to turn away from the beauties of this world,
which are mere pale imitations of the beauty of the transcendent God. These
sermons and the subsequent narratives of conversion utilize Sūfī ideas and
tropes and are deeply intertwined with Jāmī’s own Naqshbandī Sūfī ideas. In the
process of translating such episodes, Śrīvara transforms not only the Persian
words, but also the Persianate and Islamicate religiosity underlying his source,
as is evident in the thirteenth chapter of Śrīvara’s retelling.
Joseph has been captured and is to be sold as a slave. Men and women come
from all over to marvel at his perfect form. A rich woman comes to spend all her
wealth to attain this most handsome (p.69) of men. Joseph counsels her against
such attachment to beauty and goes on to preach to this woman, after which she
has what one might call a conversion experience. This is how Śrīvara describes
Page 10 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
it: after Joseph’s beauty is praised, he admonishes the woman to not

contemplate upon earthly but divine beauty. He states:
Know all of this that is seen endowed with many splendours to exist like a
reflection in the mirror of Bhava. Beautiful browed one, just as the mind,
after beholding some reflection in a mirror, instantaneously runs there
alone in order to decide about it, so too after seeing the universe, fixed and
moving, created from his power of illusion, do the wise meditate upon
Śambhu alone. Fine-hipped lady, if [you have] a strong mental attachment
to the appearance of beauty, see in your heart that the one recourse is the
joyful god, charming. Beautiful-browed one, once you see my beauty as
transient—[and] your happiness—therefore look towards the stable
[beauty] of Śambhu, containing everything.
After she heard his speech, she became freed from delusion. At that
instant, she paid reverence to his lotus feet again and again. Then the thin-
waisted woman gave up her fine elephants and her riches, took on a single
ochre robe [of the mendicant], anointed all of her limbs with ash, gave up
her affection towards family, and went to the deep forest to perform
austerities like a renunciant. Her mind was cleansed through fasts and
vows—each more difficult than the last. Stainless, her body became
purified through bathing at all of the sacred fords.16
This passage demonstrates the remarkable transformation that underlies

Śrīvara’s translation. Here the entire cultural context is changed while the ideas
and the events remain somehow similar. A tale of Sūfī devotion to God becomes
a tale of Śaiva devotion to Śambhu. While Joseph’s remarkable beauty remains
the same, as does his power to bring women to religion, the religion and indeed
the world view are changed. The Sūfī tale is fully re-imagined in a Śaiva world of
austerities and sacred bathing places.
When describing his translational project, Śrīvara characterizes Jāmī’s original

tale (kathā) as ‘connected to the treatises (śāstra) of the
Muslims’ (yavanaśāstrabaddhā).17 In saying this, Śrīvara sees Jāmī’s entire work
as bound up in the textual and intellectual tradition of the Islamicate world.
Tacitly underlying this observation is his retelling (once he composes it in the
un-ageing language of Sanskrit, viracitā mayā nirjarābhāṣāyām), being bound to
a different śāstra, a different world view, with different expectations. Like for
Malla, the process of translation for Śrīvara is an appropriation and a
transformation. (p.70) Interestingly though, Śrīvara’s translational
methodology is totalizing, that is to say, not just the words and ideas are
translated, but also the underlying world view. Jāmī’s text itself undergoes a type
of religious conversion; the Islamic Sufism of the Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā becomes a
tantric-tinged Śaivism in the Kathākautuka. Yet given the nature of the text and
its context within the Sultanate court of Muḥammad Shāh, it seems unlikely that
Page 11 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
religion was the sole driving impetus behind the creation of the Kathākautuka.
Rather Śrīvara, with all of his knowledge of the Persianate world, presented a
vision of Jāmī’s text deeply imbricated in the Sanskritic elite outlook. Instead of
a religious polemic, the Kathākautuka reads as courtly cleverness directed
towards an elite and multilingual Sultanate conversant in both Sanskritic and
Persianate expectations.
Conclusion
Pre-Mughal north India saw the influx of a tremendous amount of new cultural
forms. However, it is important to remember that the Sanskrit language and
literature became one important site of such exchange, in which ideas were
appropriated, transformed, and enriched. The three works briefly discussed here
were each produced in a different regional court, for different rulers, and with
different attitudes towards their sources; however, each of these three texts
share in a common culture of translation and exchange, at once experimental
and full of possibility. The very existence of these texts does much to break down
simple and pernicious binaries of religious community, defining historiographical
periodicization or clearly demarcated boundaries of literary cultures, yet they do
much more. The ‘encounter’ shown in each of these texts suggests a modulated
and complex reaction to the inclusion of new texts and ideas. But more than
that, Sanskrit was finding a way to be relevant in the changing literary ecology
of the regional Sultanates in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As both a
source of elite expression and site of exchange, Sanskrit texts are deeply
embedded in the literary fabric of Sultanate South Asia and are key to creating a
truly multilingual history of South Asia.
These texts show translation as much more than the simple search for word-for-
word equivalence. Rather, the Rājavinoda, the Sulaimaccarita, and the
Kathākautuka attempt to make room for the Islamicate within the structures and
expectations of the Sanskritic, while actively presenting Sanskrit as a viable
medium for elite (p.71) Sultanate texts. The Rājavinoda does this by presenting
Sultanate kingship as nothing different than classically conceived Sanskritic
kingship. The king is the cultured enjoyer (bhoktṛ) placed within the controlled
universe of cultured sumptuary pleasure. The Sulaimaccarita takes this formula
one step further, reorganizing a Biblical narrative along the lines of the Indic
ends of man (puruṣārtha). Its celebration of the story in the final chapter shows
the fluidity of textual translation, appropriation, addition, and transformation.
The story remains fundamentally the same; however, the telling places it in
conversation with Sanskritic expectations which moulds its final form. Finally,
the Kathākautuka presents a translation that makes the Sūfī Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā
legible in a Śaiva linguistic and literary register. Each of these texts use the
Sanskrit, mediated through regional courts (each of these texts mentioned
specific requests from specific rulers) for the sake of innovative acts of
translation.
Page 12 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
Śrīvara, by far the most honest and self-conscious of the authors here discussed,
recognizes the distance between works bound by different cultural assumptions,
and in attempting to translate, he came to the limit of what can be said in
Sanskrit. He refers to his source text, the Persian Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā, as
yāvanaśāstrabaddhā (tied to the Muslim [yāvana] sciences).18 In recognizing the
Islamicate cultural world as bound by a set of normative expectations, Śrīvara
presents a world view in which the Islamicate world is bound to its own
underlying theories and structures. A corollary of this is a recognition of the
śāstras that underlie the Sanskritic world view, and which undergird any
translational attempt. Each of these three texts in engaging with the Islamicate
order encodes its own view of Sanskritic, tacitly presenting a reflexive
commentary on what Sanskrit is and does.
The sources discussed here pose more questions about the role of Sanskrit in
the fifteenth and sixteenth-century sultanates than they answer. By way of
conclusion, I return to the idea of multilingual histories and the possible role of
Sanskrit in studying the historical processes of change and continuity in second-
millennium South Asia. Historical scholarship when confronted with aesthetic
artefacts from the past tend to emphasize narratives of pragmatic power
dynamics encoded within artistic gestures. Encounter, when seen as a purely
pragmatic fact, creates a logic for cultural appropriation that papers over the far
richer—and far more difficult—question of the role of aesthetics. Viewing the
process of translation from the perspective of aesthetics could perhaps provide a
way to capture some of the (p.72) complexity and depth involved in the cultural
negotiations of pre-Mughal South Asia.
Bibliography
Bibliography references:
Ali, Daud. Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Eaton, Richard. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993.
Flood, Finnbar. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and the Medieval

‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Gode, P.K. ‘Date of Udayarāja and Jagaddhara’. Journal of the University of

Bombay 9, no. 2(1940): 101–15.
Page 13 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
Hardy, Peter. Historians of Medieval India: Studies in Indo-Muslim Historical

Writing. London: Luzac, 1960. (p.76)
Hodgson, Marshall. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World

Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Kalyaṇamalla. Sulaimaccarita. In Mālayamarutam: A Collection of Minor Works

in Sanskrit: Poems, Plays, Hymns, and Anthologies, edited by V. Raghavan.
Tirupati: Central Sanskrit Institute, 1966.
Kapadia, Aparna. ‘The Last Chakravartin: The Gujarati Sultan as “Universal

King” in Fifteenth Century Sanskrit Poetry’. The Medieval History Journal 16, no.
1 (2013): 63–88.
Mahdi, Muhsined. The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy. New

York: Norton, 1990.
Minkowski, Christopher. ‘King David in Oudh: A Bible Story in Sanskrit and the
Just King at an Afghan Court’. Available at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball2185/
Minkowski.Inaugural.pdf, last accessed on 7 March 2006.
Orsini, Francesca. ‘How to Do Multilingual History? Lessons from Fifteenth-and

Sixteenth-Century North India’. IESHR 49, no. 2 (2012): 225–46.
Pollock, Sheldon. Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Power,
and Culture in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Ricci, Ronit. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion and the Arabic Cosmopolis
of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Śrīvara. Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka: Die Geschichte von Joseph in Persisch-

Indischem Gewande Sanskrit und Deutsch, edited by Richard Schmidt. Kiel: C.F.
Haeseler, 1898.
———. The Kathâkautuka of Śrîvara, edited by Mahamahopadyaya Pandit

Shivadatta and Kashinath Pandurang Parab. Bombay: Nirnayasagar Press, 1901.
Truschke, Audrey. ‘Cosmopolitan Encounters: Sanskrit and Persian at the

Mughal Court’, PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012.
Udayarāja. Rājavinodamahākāvyam, edited by G.N. Bahura. Jaipur: Rajasthan

Oriental Research Institute, 1954.
Wagoner, Phillip. ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the
Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijaynagara’. Journal of Asian Studies 55, no.
4 (November 1996): 851–80.
Page 14 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
‘A Worldwide Literature: Jāmī (1414–1492) in the Dār al-Islām and Beyond’. Last
modified on 14 February 2014. Available at http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/
jamidaralislam/.
Notes:
(*) I would like to thank Hannah Lord Archambault, Munis Faruqui, and Tyler
Williams for their insightful comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this
chapter.
(1.) Francesca Orsini, ‘How to Do Multilingual History? Lessons from Fifteenth-

and Sixteenth-Century North India’, IESHR 49, no. 2 (2012): 225–46.
(2.) Here I use the term ‘Sanskritic’ to refer to elite productions and dispositions
encoded in the Sanskrit language. In her recent dissertation ‘Cosmopolitan
Encounters’, Audrey Truschke prefers the term ‘Indic’ as the South Asian
equivalent. However, I employ the term ‘Sanskritic’ almost as a counterpart to
‘Persianate’ to emphasize the cultural-linguistic aspect of these texts. Such an
identification can further nuance the investigation of multilingualism in
Sultanate South Asia by seeing Sanskritic authors and works also trying to find
purchase in the changing literary landscape of Sultanate South Asia. For the
purposes of this chapter, the Sanskritic is set in conversation with the notion of
the Islamicate (see note 5).
(3.) This particular way of understanding Sanskrit has been persuasively argued
by Sheldon Pollock. Pollock writes: ‘The work Sanskrit did do was beyond the
Quotidian and the instrumental; it was directed above all toward articulating a
form of political consciousness and culture, politics not as transaction of
material culture … but as celebration of aesthetic power’ (Sheldon Pollock, The
Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in
Premodern India [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006], 14).
(4.) Here and throughout I utilize Marshall Hodgson’s useful term ‘Islamicate’ as
it (following Hodgson) ‘refer[s] not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to
the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the
Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and when found among non-
Muslims’ (Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a
World Civilization [Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1974], 59). An
equivalent term to explain a similar cultural complex based on classical Indian
cultural expectations is needed in order to undertake any sort of historical
discussion involving the engagement of two elite cultural spheres.
(5.) For the date of the Rājavinoda, see P.K. Gode’s essay ‘Date of Udayarāja and
Jagaddhara’, Journal of the University of Bombay 9, no. 2 (1940): 101–15.
Page 15 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
(6.) For a history of the reception of the work by modern scholarship, see Aparna
Kapadia, ‘The Last Chakravartin: The Gujarati Sultan as “Universal King” in
Fifteenth Century Sanskrit Poetry’, The Medieval History Journal 6, no. 1 (2013):
71–2.
(7.) Peter Hardy has emphasized the ideological biases underlying Persian
portrayals of kingship and the disciplinary biases that color modern scholars’
writings of histories of the Sultanates in his Historians of Medieval India: Studies
in Indo-Muslim Historical Writing (London: Luzac, 1960).
(8.) For the representation of sumptuary culture in Sanskritic courts, see Daud
Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially chapter 6. This work has
interesting parallels to the nearly contemporaneous works of Kalyāṇa Malla. The
role of sumptuary and erotic discourse in the Sulaimaccarita will be mentioned
briefly later, but it should be noted that the Sultanate elite patronized Malla’s
famous manual on erotics entitled the Anaṅgaraṅga (The Theater of Love).
(9.) Kapadia, ‘The Last Cakravartin’, 68.
(10.)
sūryo divaiva kurute jagati prakāśaṃ

kāntiṃ śaśī vitanute niyataṃ niśāyām
śrī manmahammadanarādhipateḥ pṛthvyāṃ
dṛṣṭaḥ pratāpayaśasor yugapat pracāraḥ ||2.16|| (Rājavinoda of
Udayarāja. Here and throughout, all translations from the Sanskrit
are my own).
(11.)
Yo bhāratasya bharatasya ca samprayogāt

Uccair ajāyata naye ’bhinaye pravīṇaḥ |
Vīro raṇe vitaraṇe ca viśiṣṭaśaktiḥ
karṇārjunāv api jigāya jagatprasiddhau ||2.17||
(12.) The text reads ‘vividhālaṃkārasaṃkumuda* paṅkam’ here. Unable to make

sufficient sense of this reading, I follow Raghavan’s suggestion in the notes:
‘vividhālaṃkārā mṛgamadapaṅkam ity atrāpekṣ itaṃpadadvayam’.
(13.) Here I quote the text as it appears in Raghavan’s edition, noting with an
asterix forms that seem grammatically or semantically suspect. Raghavan has
already noted these and has sometimes provided emendations in the text or in
the notes.
Purā viśalānagare dhanado nāma dhārmikaḥ | vaiśyokaḥare badhudhanī

svakulācāratatparaḥ ||4.89|| tasya* kaścic chukaṃ divyaṃ pañcavarṇaṃ
mahaujasam |
Page 16 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
nāvikaḥ samupānī ya dattavān dvīpasambhavam ||4.90|| taṃ gṛhītvā vaṇig

divye kāñcane ratnamaṇḍite | pañjare nyasya vividhaiḥ phalaiḥ
puṇḍrekṣujair guḍaiḥ ||4.91|| pupoṣa nirataṃ putram iva sarvaguṇānvitam
| sarvabhāṣāsu nipuṇaḥ sarvavidyāviśāradaḥ ||4.92|| vivardhata śukaḥ
prītiṃ janayan pālakasya saḥ | tasya bhāryā viśālākṣī rūpeṇāpratimā bhuvi
||4.93|| vibhuṃ nirasya satataṃ parakīyā babhūva ha | bahir dvāre sadā
sthitvā kāminaḥ saṃpratī kṣatī* ||4.94|| vipaṇiṃ gatavati nāthe
vividhālaṃkārasaṃkumuda* paṅkam | kuṃkumacandanamiśraṃ liptvā
kucayoḥ prayāti saṃketam ||4.95|| madanabhūtaparājitamānasā vadar
ājitamauktikacitrakā | sadanamāgatakāmukamaṇḍalī hṛdayarañjanam
ācaratī* babhau ||4.96|| madhuravacanaiḥ kāṃścid yūnaḥ kaṭākṣ-
avilokanaiḥ vividhamadhurāhāraiḥ kāṃścid viśeṣadhanārpaṇaiḥ |
ghanakucaparī rambhaiḥ kāṃścit kaṭītaṭasevanaiḥ pratidinam iyaṃ

santarpyās te manobhavavaibhave ||4.97|| evaṃ vasantīṃ gṛhiṇīṃ dine
dine vilokya kīraḥ pracukopa tāṃ prati | gṛhāgatāyāśunivedayad* yathā
tathā purā dṛṣṭam upetya so viśe ||4.98|| taveyaṃ gṛhiṇī deva kulaṭā
caṭulāśayā | ahardivaṃ paraiḥ puṃbhī ramate militā mudā ||4.99|| yaṃ
yaṃ paśyati puruṣaṃtaruṇaṃ śaraṇāgataṃ paraṃ purataḥ | taṃ taṃ
parirabhya mudā datvā rataṃ punaḥ preṣayati ||4.100|| evaṃ pratyaham
antargṛhavṛttaṃ bodhayantam anuvelam | hantuṃ śukam ātmani sā cintām
akarot sakhībhir anvartham ||4.101|| śrutvā śukavacaḥ satyaṃ manvāno
vaiśyasattamaḥ | dārān santāḍayāmāsa tarjanair marjanair muhuḥ ||4.102||
evaṃsantarjitā tasya gṛhiṇī krodhasaṃyutā | upāyaṃ kancid ālocya
śukapanjarasannidhau ||4.103|| caṇakān upale kṣiptvā pipeṣa dhvanim
udvaman* | upariṣṭāc chukasyāṅgeva varṣodakavipruṣaḥ ||4.104|| timire
dīpam uddīpya darpaṇaṃ bhrāmayat*puraḥ | śilācakradhvaniṃ
megharāvaṃ mene śukas tadā ||4.105|| ambhaḥ pṛṣatkapatanaṃ
varṣodakam amanyata | dīpāntikādarś aparibhramaṇaṃ vidyud ity ayam ||
4.106|| mene tataḥ samāyātaṃ vaiśyam āha sa sādaram | niśāyāṃ kva
sthito ’siv ṛṣṭyā kiṃ nu na cārditaḥ ||4.107|| rātryāṃ vṛṣṭir mahaty āsīdity
uktaḥ prāha* taṃ khagam | kva vṛṣṭiḥ patitā rātryāṃ śukatūṣṇīṃ* bravīṣi
mām ||4.108|| mṛṣāvādī bhavān adya vijnātaṃ bhāṣitaṃ tava | evam eva
purāpi tvam uktavān ayi nityaśaḥ ||4.109|| majjāyāṃ praty apīty uktvā
krodharaktāntalocanaḥ | jaghāna daṇḍam ādāya śukaṃ kopād athorujaḥ ||
4.110|| avicārya śukaṃ hatvā dṛṣṭvā ca gṛhiṇī gatim | paścat
tāpasamāyuktaḥ śukam smṛtvā rudan sadā ||4.111|| (Kalyaṇamalla,
‘Sulaimaccarita’, in Mālayamarutam: A Collection of Minor Works in
Sanskrit: Poems, Plays, Hymns, and Anthologies, ed. V. Raghavan [Tirupati:
Central Sanskrit Institute, 1966]).
(14.) The wide and rapid diffusion of Jāmī’s work is the focus of an ongoing
interdisciplinary working group organized by the University of Chicago, the
Neubauer Collegium, and the Franke Institute, titled ‘A Worldwide Literature:
Jāmī (1414–1492) in the Dār al-Islām and Beyond’. For more information on Jāmī
Page 17 of 18
Muslim Mahākāvyas
and on the extent and magnitude of the textual tradition his work inaugurated,
see the project’s website: http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/jamidaralislam/.
(15.) The regional specificity of Śrīvara and his Kathākautuka are discussed at
greater length in my PhD thesis (‘Translation and History: The Development of a
Kashmiri Textual Tradition from ca.1000–1500’, PhD diss, University of
California Berkeley, 2015).
(16.) The Sanskrit quoted from the Kathākautuka is based on the edition of
Schmidt:
Yad idam dṛśyate sarvaṃ nānākautukasaṃyutam | tadavaihi bhavādarśe

pratibimbam iva sthitam ||12.32|| yathā kiṃcit samālokya darpaṇe
pratibimbitam | mano dhāvati tatraiva kartuṃ tan niścayaṃ muhuḥ ||
12.33|| tathaiva sakalaṃ subhru jagat sthāvarajaṅgamam | dṛṣṭvā
māyāmayaṃ śambhuṃ dhyāyanty ekaṃ manīṣiṇaḥ ||12.34|| mānasaṃ ced
varārohe rūpadarśanalālasam | paśyaikaṃ śaraṇaṃ mattaṃ hṛdi devaṃ
manoramam ||12.35|| dṛṣṭvaiva māmakaṃ rūpaṃ vinaśyat kiṃsukhaṃ tava
| sthiraṃ sarvagataṃ tasmāt subhru śambhor vilokaya ||12.36|| iti
tadvacanaṃ śrutvā gatamoheva sābhavat | tatkṣaṇāt tatpadāmbhojam
praṇanāma muhur muhuḥ ||12.37|| tatas sā gajaratnāni tāni tāṃ
sampadaṃ tathā | vihāyādāya kāṣāyapaṭṭam ekaṃ sumadhyamā ||12.38||
bhasmabhūṣitasarvāṅgā bandhusnehavivarjitā | vratājinī va tapase jagāma
gahanaṃ vanam ||12.39|| kṛcchrātikṛcchraprāka-vratadhūtamano ‘malā |
sarvatīrthāvagahena śuddhadehābhavat tadā ||12.40||
(17.) Śrīvara, Kathākautuka, v. 1.2. Here I cite from my own provisional edition
of the Kathākautuka, which is based on a close reading of the two published
editions (Schmidt, 1893 and Shivadatta and Parab, 1901).
(18.) In the Kathākautuka, the half-verse containing this term reads as a

statement, in brief, of Śrīvara’s translational methodology. He writes:
Viracyate yāvanaśāstrabaddhā kathā mayā nirjarabhāṣ ayeyam. ||1.2 cd||
This story (kathā), bound to Muslim śāstra, is fashioned (viracyate) by me

through the unaging language [=Sanskrit].
(Śrīvara, Kathākautuka).
Access brought to you by:
Page 18 of 18

Muslim Mahākāvyas Sanskrit and Translation in The Sultanates

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Muslim Mahākāvyas Sanskrit and Translation in The Sultanates

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Muslim Mahākāvyas Sanskrit and Translation in The Sultanates

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Muslim Mahākāvyas

Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India

Print publication date: 2018

Abstract and Keywords

Rājavinoda, and Sulaimaccarita, respectively—force the modern reader to ask

In her essay ‘How to Do Multilingual History? Lessons from Fifteenth- and

Viewing the phenomenon of Sanskrit production in Sultanate courts from this

The utility of translation as a hermeneutic device has begun to be recognized by

So why write such an account of a Muslim king? Before beginning to analyse

sultan’.9 Kapadia’s intervention is important in that it shows that other factors

The idealization of Maḥmūd in Sanskrit points towards a complex world of

In this verse, Sultan Maḥmūd Begaḍā is imagined without irony or contradiction

Here I want to suggest that this Sanskritic vocabulary also must be

Malla himself was an expert on kāmaśāstra, or erotics, and this orientation is

In translating this story, the Sulaimaccarita attempts, in a sophisticated way, to

the role of story literature in Kalyaṇa’s work of translation and re-imagination.

the falling of drops of water to be rain; he thought the quick flashes

The Sulaimaccarita allows in a sophisticated and experimental way for the

Śrīvara’s translation of Jāmī’s poem is audacious, ignoring or explicitly excising

Joseph’s beauty is his main characteristic in the Qur’ānic version of the

it: after Joseph’s beauty is praised, he admonishes the woman to not

This passage demonstrates the remarkable transformation that underlies

When describing his translational project, Śrīvara characterizes Jāmī’s original

Flood, Finnbar. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and the Medieval

Gode, P.K. ‘Date of Udayarāja and Jagaddhara’. Journal of the University of

Hardy, Peter. Historians of Medieval India: Studies in Indo-Muslim Historical

Hodgson, Marshall. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World

Kalyaṇamalla. Sulaimaccarita. In Mālayamarutam: A Collection of Minor Works

Kapadia, Aparna. ‘The Last Chakravartin: The Gujarati Sultan as “Universal

Mahdi, Muhsined. The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy. New

Orsini, Francesca. ‘How to Do Multilingual History? Lessons from Fifteenth-and

Śrīvara. Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka: Die Geschichte von Joseph in Persisch-

———. The Kathâkautuka of Śrîvara, edited by Mahamahopadyaya Pandit

Truschke, Audrey. ‘Cosmopolitan Encounters: Sanskrit and Persian at the

Udayarāja. Rājavinodamahākāvyam, edited by G.N. Bahura. Jaipur: Rajasthan

(1.) Francesca Orsini, ‘How to Do Multilingual History? Lessons from Fifteenth-

(9.) Kapadia, ‘The Last Cakravartin’, 68.

sūryo divaiva kurute jagati prakāśaṃ

Yo bhāratasya bharatasya ca samprayogāt

(12.) The text reads ‘vividhālaṃkārasaṃkumuda* paṅkam’ here. Unable to make

Purā viśalānagare dhanado nāma dhārmikaḥ | vaiśyokaḥare badhudhanī

nāvikaḥ samupānī ya dattavān dvīpasambhavam ||4.90|| taṃ gṛhītvā vaṇig

ghanakucaparī rambhaiḥ kāṃścit kaṭītaṭasevanaiḥ pratidinam iyaṃ

Yad idam dṛśyate sarvaṃ nānākautukasaṃyutam | tadavaihi bhavādarśe

(18.) In the Kathākautuka, the half-verse containing this term reads as a

Viracyate yāvanaśāstrabaddhā kathā mayā nirjarabhāṣ ayeyam. ||1.2 cd||

This story (kathā), bound to Muslim śāstra, is fashioned (viracyate) by me

Access brought to you by:

You might also like