Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes colonial treatments of the Persian Mahabharata, originally translated under the Mughal Emperor Akbar in the 1580s. I examine how early orientalists approached the work’s text and illustrations and thereby uncover some of their larger presumptions about Indo-Persian translations.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1580s, the Mughal Emperor Akbar sponsored the translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata into Persian and ordered the newly-minted Mughal epic lavishly illustrated. This work was originally intended for consumption by a narrow band of imperial Mughal elites, who in turn sponsored their own illuminated copies during the seventeenth century. Many of these early manuscripts of the Persian Mahabharata came to have vibrant afterlives during the colonial period that remain wholly unexamined. Europeans first accessed the Mahabharata through its Mughal-created Persian version and moreover identified the work's illustrations as excellent specimens of Indian art. In this paper, I propose to detail colonial receptions of both the text and images of the Persian Mahabharata with particular attention to the broader assumptions about archival sources that shaped colonial encounters with Indo-Persian texts. I begin with colonial treatments of the text of the Mughal Mahabharata, including William Jones's outright dismissal of this translation and an attempt by David Price to produce his own redaction of the work. I then move into uses of the translation's images, including the display of the illustrations from the master imperial copy in Jaipur in 1883 and the subsequent publication of a catalog of this exhibition by T.H. Hendley. Last, I trace how the colonial legacy of interpreting the Mughal Mahabharata has impacted modern approaches to this translation and others Mughal Persian works today. In closing I suggest a few ways to productively move forward and better reconstruct the relationship between text and image in the Indo-Persian translations.