From Central Asia to Kashmir: A Holistic View of Mysticism

Persian spirituality exerted a profound influence on the religious culture of Kashmir. The local Hindu Shaivite monism that went back to the ninth century was propagated by the Rishi ascetics. This paper aims to examine the influence of Sufism on the popular Islamic culture in Kashmir, in particular the role of the fourteenth-century figure of Nund Rishi or Shaykh Nūruddīn. The findings will be based on the qualitative analysis of the historical sources pertaining to the period concerned, with a focus on the Sanskrit epic of Rajatarangini and the poetry of Nund Rishi which explicitly refers to famous Persian mystics. This study has valid implications for the research on the causes of the socio-cultural transformation of Kashmir that were not only initiated but also taken to its completion and fruition by the local Rishi order.

A Padshah like Manu: Political Advice for Akbar in the Persian Mahābhārata

In the late sixteenth century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar sponsored the translation of more than one dozen Sanskrit texts into Persian, chief among them the Mahābhārata. The epic was retitled the Razmnāma (Book of War) in Persian and rapidly became a seminal work of Mughal imperial culture. Within the Razmnāma, the Mughal translators devoted particular attention to sections on political advice. They rendered book twelve (out of eighteen books), the Śānti Parvan (Book of Peace), into Persian at disproportionate length to the rest of the text and singled out parts of this section to adorn with quotations of Persian poetry. Book twelve also underwent significant transformations in terms of its content as Mughal thinkers reframed the Mahābhārata’s views on ethics and sovereignty in light of their own imperial interests. I analyze this section of the Razmnāma in comparison to the original Sanskrit epic and argue that the Mughal translators reformulated parts of the Mahābhārata’s political advice in both style and substance in order to speak directly to Emperor Akbar. The type of advice that emerged offers substantial insight into the political values that Mughal elites sought to cultivate through translating a Sanskrit work on kingship.

Pradyumna

This monograph provides the first full-scale English language study of Pradyumna, the son of the Hindu god Kṛṣṇa. Often represented as a young man in mid-adolescence, Pradyumna is both a handsome double of his demon-slaying father and the rebirth of Kāmadeva, the God of Love. Sanskrit epic, purāṇic, and kāvya narratives of the 300–1300 CE period celebrate Pradyumna’s sexual potency, mastery of illusory subterfuges, and military prowess in supporting the work of his avatāra father. These materials reflect chiefly the values of an evolving Brahminical and Vaiṣṇava tradition deeply invested in the imperatives of family, patriline, the violent but necessary defense of the social and cosmic order, and the celebration of beauty and desire as a means to the divine. As such, Pradyumna’s evolving narratives, almost completely unknown in existing studies of Hindu mythology, provide a point of access to the development of Krishna bhakti and Vaiṣṇava theism more broadly. However, Jain sources cast Pradyumna as an exemplary figure through whom a pointed rejection of these values can be articulated, even while sharing certain of their elementary premises. This book assembles these narratives, presents key Sanskrit materials in translation and summary form, and articulates the social, gender, and religious values encoded in them. Most importantly, the study argues that Pradyumna’s signature two-handed maneuver—the audacious appropriation of a feminine partner, effectuating and enabled by the emasculating destruction of her demonic male protector—communicates a persisting fantasy of male power, expressed in the language of mutually implicating sex and violence.

Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra

The Pāñcarātra is a Hindu tradition that worships Viṣṇu as the supreme god. Its origins date back to the pre-Christian era, and certain features of it can still be found in the related Hindu-tradition of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas. Its earliest textual source, having been composed around the 3rd to the 5th century ce, is the so-called Nārāyaṇīya, which is a part of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata. In this text the Pāñcarātra does not yet bear the tantric features that become characteristic for the tradition as known from the Saṃhitās, which may have been composed from around the 9th century onward. The Saṃhitās are the most important texts of the tradition and are traditionally considered to have been revealed by god Viṣṇu himself. They deal with the theology and philosophy of the tradition, but most prominently with rituals. Rituals are the main means for a Pāñcarātra follower to achieve the tradition’s religious goals. As in other tantric traditions, these goals are worldly pleasures (bhukti) and liberation (mukti) from transmigration. In early Pāñcarātra Saṃhitās, rituals are to be performed by individual persons for their own benefit. In later Saṃhitās, probably due to political influences, public temple worship for the benefit of the king and the state becomes the main focus. The early extant Saṃhitās probably originate from North India, and there is evidence that Pāñcarātra was widely practiced in Kashmir. However, from perhaps the 11th century, Pāñcarātra mainly flourished in South India. The social background of Pāñcarātra followers over the centuries has not yet been investigated in depth, but we do know that the tradition’s historical development was shaped by various social groups and subtraditions, as well as their interactions, sometimes involving rivalry.

Defeating Patriarchy on Its Own Terms: The Paradox of Female Chastity in Krittivasa’s Ramayana

<em>This essay attempts to analyze the role of women in the Bengali Ramayana of Krittivasa, a regional version of the original Sanskrit epic composed by Valmiki. It does so from the perspective of the strict code of female chastity enshrined in a patriarchal society and enforced upon its women by their male guardians within and beyond the home. While on the one hand, it is an instrument of female subjugation, this essay make an attempt to analyze how the strict observance of this code by the women in the epic, makes it a weapon of female empowerment across the different strata of society through which the text operates. The powerful spiritual energy generated in the process by these women can threaten even the most powerful of patriarchs including the epic hero Rama himself.</em>

Uma porta fechada ao devaneio: uma aplicação a textos sânscritos dos esquemas de abordagem linguístico-retórica de Isaac Nicolau Salum

In four articles issued between 1971 and 1975, Isaac Nicolau Salum outlined the main ideas of a “linguistic-rhetorical approach” method to texts not giving it a definitive form, which was, however, tried to be attained by means of inumerable text schematization exercises published in eleven booklets up to 1979.Rescuing some of lhe scattered proposals in those writings, this article aims at meditating about the method value for a critical study of texts and for the analysis of the speech, and at the same time, as a corroboration of the procedure effectiveness. applying it to the characterization of Nala and Damayanti, characters of a parallel account to the narrative structure of the Sanskrit epic poem Mahābhārata, for whom it reveals rhetorical dimensions that a less attentive reading will neglect.

Translating Rāma as a Proto-Muḥammadan Prophet: Masīḥ’s Mas̱navī-i Rām va Sītā

How have religious communities imagined the scriptures of other communities? In answering this question, this article aims to nuance our understanding of pre-colonial and self-consciously Islamic translations into Persian of Indic language texts understood to be Hindu by considering Masīḥ’s early 17th-century Mas̱navī-i Rām va Sītā, a Persian translation of Vālmīki’s Sanskrit epic, the Rāmāyaṇa (circa 2nd century bce). It opens by remarking on a shift in the study of the relations between poetics and politics in Persian translations of Indic texts. Then, attempting to refine our understanding of this relation, it takes issue with prior studies of this poem before answering the following questions these studies fail to pose: how does the prophetological metaphysics of the prefatory chapters relate to the poetics of emotion in the main body of the tale? And what does this relation let us infer of Masīḥ’s theological conception of translation?