| In seventeenth-century India, a Muslim prince, Muhammad Dara Shikoh (1615-59), translated into Persian roughly fifty of the Sanskrit sacred texts known as the Upanisads, affirming that they contained the key to interpreting the allegorical secrets of the Qur'an. Before he was killed during a struggle for dynastic succession, on the orders of his younger brother Aurangzeb, Dara Shikoh, an affiliate of the Qadiri sufi order, had composed several sufi works as well as studies of Indic thought and also commissioned Persian translations of Indic texts. By examining the writings that Dara produced and commissioned, together with their later dissemination and reception, this dissertation investigates an important chapter in the interactions between Indic and Islamic intellectual traditions in early modern South Asia. I contend that Dara Shikoh's works speak to the formation of a discourse on Indic religions, which takes shape through the circulation and intertextual interfaces of writings within the Persian ecumene and also across linguistic boundaries.;Three main strands of inquiry run throughout this dissertation. The dissertation locates Dara Shikoh's interventions of interpreting and codifying Indic knowledge within the context of Mughal practices of royal self-fashioning, which also served as an instrument of political authority. It also explores the intersections between the prince's project and a set of multilingual conversations on spiritual technologies of liberation which traversed the arena of the court and beyond. Finally, it considers the role of Dara Shikoh's legacy and memory for later articulations of a monotheistic Hinduism, asking how the textualization of Indic knowledge through the medium of Persian helped define the ways in which certain Hindus came to systematize their traditions from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. |
