Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores a manuscript on the art of statecraft composed by a Spanish Jesuit at the Mughal court, and ways in which it renews shared Perso-Hellenic political ideas to advance a socio-religious objective.

Paper long abstract:

The Jesuit missions to the Mughal court are typically conceived of in terms of their religious character, and the theological, if collaborative, works they produced. Yet scholarship has failed to account for the final and least studied of these Mughal-Jesuit literary collaborations, which appears to be of a different, non-religious nature: a Persian manuscript on the art of statecraft (Adab us-Saltanat, 1018AH/1609AD).

Presented as the work of the head of the mission, Jerome Xavier, this mirror for princes, dedicated to emperor Jahangir, deploys knowledge systems that at many points overwhelm patent dualities of Islamo-Christian ideological opposition by appealing, perhaps inadvertently, to pre-islamic political ideas of a shared Perso-Hellenic world -- ideas that in varying forms had been accumulated, appropriated, and shared across the Eurasian space for over over two millennia.

Among other subjects, the text directly addresses the importance of translation for the advancement of useful knowledge. This paper explores to what extent this unique work from the Mughal court relies on non-religious knowledge systems to advance a socio-religious objective. As a precolonial instance of cross-cultural literary collaboration, its manuscripts, long left to languish in European libraries, throw new light on the complexity of non-religious knowledge in cross-cultural encounters, and of early-modern South Asia in global-historical context.