within the narrative, Asif notes that the Chachnama ex- plicitly argues for “building alliances, negotiating differ- ence, and engaging in dialogue” (92), its form and ideas having been shaped by the genre of Persian, Arabic, and Greek advice literature as well as by Sanskrit political treatises such as the Arthasastra.
In perhaps the most interesting chapter of the book (chap. 5), Asif delves deeper into the ethical dimensions of the narrative through an analysis of three episodes cen- tered on women. He argues that the speech and actions of these powerful, yet usually ignored or romanticized, female characters illustrates the true nature of the Chachnama as a discourse on “how one ought to behave in social and political relationships, how one listens to the other, and how a ruler acts justly toward his subjects”
(130). In one of these episodes, after overthrowing and killing the ruler of Sind, Raja Dahar, Qasim is shown the way of tolerance toward his new subjects by Raja Dahar’s queen. She points out to Qasim that if he killed all those who had fought the invasion, he would be hurting the kingdom’s—and his own—economic and political pros- pects, since it was these builders and merchants who had kept the region prosperous and would provide the basis for his rule. Qasim then weds the queen and cements his position among the people. Qasim’s demise at the end of the narrative is also engineered by women, in this case by Raja Dahar’s daughters.
By reading the Chachnama as a whole and within its context, Asif convincingly argues that it is a political tract focused on the ethics of political and social relationships and accommodating sacral and other differences. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the Chachnama can- not also be read as a conquest narrative or thatiAli Kufi was uninterested in the idea and practice of conquest; in fact, accommodation and dialogue, on the one hand, and conquest, on the other, are not necessarily mutually ex- clusive. There is no doubt that the narrative is far more than a conquest narrative, and it may not valorize a cer- tain type of brute conquest with which it has been associ- ated, but repeatedly minimizing its conquest aspect un- dermines Asif’s otherwise useful study (see, for instance, the introduction). Rather than eliding their existence, it is imperative that as historians of South Asia, we find ways to theorize warfare, violence, and inter- and intra-reli- gious conflict in the premodern period so as not to cede that ground to contemporary extremists, who seize upon these historical moments to advance their divisive politi- cal agendas.
As Asif argues, histories of Muslim polities in South Asia have to recognize them as “lived spaces” (49), inter- connected with each other and wider geographies, and home to particular social and cultural milieus. To an ex- tent, Asif’s descriptions of his own travels through the landscape of Sind and his conversations with local histo- rians provide that sense of the region as an intercon- nected, sacral, lived space. However, the book misses the opportunity to present a social history of Sind in the early centuries of the second millennium that would reveal the texture of social and cultural life in that period and bring to life its diverse inhabitants, thus giving the reader a
sense of the intertwined world—beyond the realms of high politics and literature—of which Sind and the Chachnama were an integral part.
CHITRALEKHAZUTSHI
The College of William & Mary
AUDREYTRUSCHKE. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. (South Asia across the Disciplines.) New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii, 362.
Cloth $60.00, e-book $59.99.
The historiography on the Mughal Empire has always been dominated by historians who focus on its socioeco- nomic and military rationales. Most of these historians were educated at Aligarh University, and hence they of- ten had a background in Marxist theory, usually comple- mented by a degree of secular nationalism. They were all very well trained in the main Mughal but “non-Indian”
language, Persian, and their pioneering work produced a significant number of new insights into the workings of the Mughal apparatus of administration. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the results of that work began to be criticized by the next generation of scholars, both from India (some even originating from Aligarh) and from Europe and the United States. These revisionist scholars continued to rely on Persian sources but also looked for documentary alternatives from the fringes of and the declining phase of the empire: regional source material from South India, documents from Euro- pean archives, and sources mostly belonging to the eigh- teenth century. As a result, the vision of the Mughal Em- pire as an efficient administrative colossus was replaced by a view of it as a much more informal empire held to- gether by ongoing negotiations between a huge number of relatively autonomous sharers of the realm, a situation depicted as almost inevitably causing imperial decline and, at the same time, regional centralization during the eighteenth century. What happened in the first decade of the twenty-first century can best be described as the
“global turn” in Mughal studies: the Mughal Empire was increasingly compared with and connected to the rest of the world, primarily with the other Muslim “gunpowder”
empires—of the Ottomans and the Safavids—and the cradle of Mughal power, Central Asia. Today, the Mughals are no longer seen as ruling a “largely forgot- ten” early modern empire “that has little to contribute to our understanding of the world more broadly” (1).
Audrey Truschke represents another “new” generation of Mughal historians that looks down on “the narrow pre- occupation with on-the-ground facts” of a previous gen- eration, which presented the Mughals in a rather “dry lit- any of facts about who they were and what they valued”
(245). After the global turn, Truschke’s work exemplifies the fact that Mughal studies is now undergoing an Indo- logical turn. Her research is clearly inspired by her two mentors at Columbia University: Sheldon Pollock and Allison Busch. In their spirit, Truschke aims to rethink the Mughals in light of their literary production. Crucial to her endeavor is the shift from an exclusive focus on Persian sources; instead, as Truschke argues, scholars
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should focus on moments of cultural encounter between the Persian and Sanskrit literary traditions in the making of Mughal power. Regarding power, the author also dis- tances herself from a simplistic Weberian interpretation based on power’s bottom-up legitimacy and instead stresses—following Pollock’s work on pre-Islamicate In- dic empires—its aesthetics. The author is also interested in the impact of these interactions on the alleged decline of Sanskrit, another key problem addressed by Pollock.
The book is brilliantly supported by Truschke’s ex- tremely impressive and rare philological scholarship, which combines both Sanskrit and Persian and enables her ability to painstakingly compare the original texts and their translations in the various editions. The author accomplishes such analysis most fruitfully in her discus- sion of a Persian translation of the Mahabharata (chap. 3).
In another chapter (6), the parallel story of the Ramayana gets much less scrutiny and is instead discussed with vari- ous other cases of the Indo-Persian incorporation of San- skrit, from the Deccan historian Muhammad Qasim Firishtah to the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh. For reasons that are not clear to this reader, Truschke considers Dara Shikoh’s experiments with Sanskrit as “sharply distin- guished” from the early Mughal projects (223). This as- sessment, in turn, raises more general questions about the importance, selection, and sequence of the texts on offer in the book. Why not apply the brilliant analysis of the Mahabharata to the other texts as well?
The rest of the chapters are slightly less philological, but still offer an extremely rich survey. Chapter 1 dis- cusses Brahman and Jain Sanskrit intellectuals at the Mughal court. Chapter 2 surveys the Sanskrit textual pro- duction for the Mughals. The engagement of the Mu- ghals’ main ideologue, Abul Fazl, with the Sanskrit tradi- tion is discussed in chapter 4, and chapter 5 surveys San- skrit writings about the Mughals. Meanwhile, the reader gets intriguing insights into the day-to-day process of translation; for example, the study shows how important the Hindi vernacular was for making it all possible.
Considering the thoroughness of Truschke’s archival work, one gets the impression that the texts offered are al- ready quite exhaustive and not the tip of the iceberg. We are dealing with just dozens, rather than thousands, of rel- evant works. Therefore, Truschke’s claim that “much of the Mughal past can be reconstructed only from Sanskrit text” (245) is certainly overenthusiastic; her favorite Mughal past is clearly not that of the money and armies that she too easily dismisses as insignificant and boring.
Nonetheless, I feel that the book forcefully demonstrates the fact that, even if the quantity of its texts was quite lim- ited, Sanskrit contributed significantly to the formulation of Mughal power, particularly evident when we look at Mughal translation projects. To a lesser extent, this can also be said about the Latin tradition that was introduced through the Jesuits, which would have provided an inter- esting case of comparison. Hence, the book is a must-read for Mughal historians, and even more so for global histo- rians who are interested in the entangled histories of cross-cultural encounters, and who, pace Truschke, often have to depend on imperfect translations.
Coming to the question about the impact of this love affair between the Mughals and Sanskrit on Sanskrit it- self, it seems as if Persian was beating Sanskrit as a univer- sal (not Indian) language of incorporation, already signal- ing the latter’s decline in the centuries ahead. This brings me to the question of why: why were Mughal rulers and scholars so interested in Sanskrit? This question is not an- swered in the book, because Truschke, for all her philo- logical splendor, fails to really engage with the Mughals’
intellectual background of millenarian (e.g., Mahdawi) and illuminationist (Ishraqi) thought, which, more than anything else (e.g. a penchant for “wonders”), inspired them to engage in these endeavors. Consequently, the Mughals were attempting to make their rule not more In- dian but more cosmic.
JOSGOMMANS
Leiden University
CHANDAKSENGOOPTA. The Rays before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in Colonial India. New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2016. Pp. xi, 418. $60.00.
Chandak Sengoopta’s cultural and intellectual history of the illustrious Ray family of India—usually known in the Western world through the twentieth century filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921–1992)—explores three generations of Rays, from the eighteenth century through the early-twen- tieth-century birth of Satyajit. With links to everything from printing technology, religious reform, children’s lit- erature, book design, nationalist politics, painting, and women’s education, the history of the Ray family indexes the larger history of colonial India in multiple ways.
In six substantive chapters bracketed by an introduc- tion and epilogue, Sengoopta tells the story of the family, starting from their origins in Mymensingh (in what is now Bangladesh), and their caste background of Kayasthas—
traditional administrators, clerks, and judicial officials who would serve empires and polities of various kinds.
Sengoopta describes how the story of this family was intertwined with that of the emergence of religious re- form via the famous Brahma Samaj association begun in 1820s Calcutta. This convergence occurred with the mar- riage of Upendrakishore Ray (1863–1915), the original figure in Sengoopta’s history, to Bidhumukhi, daughter of Dwarkanath Ganguli (1844–1898). Ganguli was a prominent member of the Brahma Samaj and devoted much of his adult life to the organization’s advancement of women’s education and challenges to Hindu strictures against widows and caste-based social taboos. He also worked for nationalist causes in the arts, literature, and other areas. Sengoopta offers great detail (chaps. 2, 3) on Ganguli’s many achievements in publishing, including the periodical about women’s issues Abalabandhab (Friend of the weak), and in political organizing and activism, includ- ing sustained work on behalf of indentured laborers in Assam in the late nineteenth century. These chapters on Ganguli offer analysis of his literary pursuits, such as his two-volume novel about thrift, saving, and morality, Su- ruchir Kutir (Suruchi’s cottage [1880, 1884]) as well as his 1875 play Vira Nari: The Heroine of Scinde.
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