The same year, 1655, in which he composed the Majma, he likely also had it translated into Sanskrit, with the title Samudrasangama (Ocean’s confluence).62 The Sanskrit translation is a fairly faithful rendition, closely following the Persian text, though in many places it replaces Islamic terms with Sanskrit counterparts. So monotheist becomes vaidika, or a Vedic scholar; a hadith of the Prophet is rendered as a bhagavadavakyam, or saying of God; Allah is parabrahmana, or the supreme brahman; a Sufi is an ekatmavadin or someone who propounds one soul, a term denoting the absolute monists of Vedanta; and Muhammad is mahasiddha, meaning a great spiritual master or yogi.63 The Sanskrit text also adds some details missing in the Persian; for instance, it mentions Baba Lal by name as one of the prince’s main interlocutors.64
Who was the intended audience of the Samudrasangama, the Sanskrit counterpart to the Majma-ul-bahrain? These were not the vast numbers of Persian-literate Hindus working in the Mughal administration. The use of Sanskrit spoke directly to Brahmin intellectuals, some of whom held their Muslim rulers at a suspicious arm’s length. Jain scholars too would be able to read it, but they may have not constituted a primary audience. We can assume that many of Dara’s pandit contacts were, like Kavindracharya, residents of Benares, a city under the prince’s own jurisdiction, as he still held the governorship of Allahabad. Regardless of its audience, the translation gave Dara’s Persian project of comparison its mirror equivalent, in sweeping universal terms.
There were also clear political implications to Dara Shukoh’s acts of writing and translating. The prince’s studies had revealed to him a truth that he wished to promulgate amongst like-minded people, drawing monistic or monotheistic scholars into his fold. The Majma’s composition revealed not only the prince’s spiritual journey, but also the type of rulership he was performing. As Shah Jahan’s act of temple destruction early in his reign reveals, Benares was no isolated provincial outpost. Actions taken there would have an impact on imperial relations with Hindu chieftains and rulers elsewhere. Several prominent Brahmins in Benares had roots in South and Central India and were still linked to networks there.65
Most copies of the Majma-ul-bahrain present the following topics as areas for comparison and detailed commentary:
The Five Elements
The Senses
Meditation
Divine Attributes
Spirit
Winds
The Four Worlds
Sound
Light
Mystical Vision
The Names
Prophethood and Sainthood
Brahma’s Cosmic Egg
Directions
Sky
Earth
Divisions of the Earth
The Intermediate State
Resurrection
Liberation
Night and Day
Perpetual Cycles of Time
To a modern reader, the Majma’s ordering might appear rather strange. In fact, Jatindra Bimal Chaudhuri, modern editor and translator of the Samudrasangama, finds the nature of this arrangement “haphazard.” Chaudhuri offers his own alternative model of how the chapters ought to be more sensibly organized—under the rubrics of “matter,” “soul,” and “God,” respectively, proceeding from lowest to highest in the hierarchy of the three realities.66
On closer inspection, Dara’s categories are not as eccentric as they might seem. We can see that the Majma draws greatly on themes from his conversations with Baba Lal, even though the textual versions of these dialogues appear far removed from the actual discussions. But the prince did not receive information passively; rather, he absorbed, reshaped, and rearranged what he learned. For instance, when he met Baba Lal, he asked about the five elements in Indic thought, which he contrasts with the four that “Persian books” acknowledged. By the time he writes the Majma-ul-bahrain, Dara has found a fifth element in the Islamic view of the world—the “Great Throne” (arsh-i akbar) of God—to match the other five.67
The Majma is also often based on book knowledge, though the information that Dara presents cannot be traced to just one or two sources. The work’s categories, taken as a whole, do not reflect any of the prevailing genres of Sanskrit knowledge traditions. And though some of the categories find resonance in certain aspects of Sufi literature, the selection appears to be the end result of a sophisticated individual process of inquiry and reasoning.
Some sections of the Majma engage deeply with specific religious texts. Yet, the only scripture it explicitly cites is the Quran. The chapters on the four worlds and on sound can be read as extended commentaries on the Mandukya Upanishad. The section on light offers an interpretation of the famous light verse in the Quran, bringing out its allegorical meanings. Dara’s discussion of prophethood addresses a major problem in Islamic theology: Does God transcend all attributes of creation, or are some of his attributes similar to those possessed by his creatures? Following Ibn Arabi, Dara supports a combination of these two positions, integrating the perspectives of God’s incomparability (tanzih) with his similarity (tashbih). This section invokes Ibn Arabi’s discussion of the prophet Noah in his Fusus and related works. The Majma’s longest chapter, on liberation (mukti), offers a creative prose translation of verses from the Bhagvata Purana, a pre-tenth-century text detailing the story of Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu. This section from the Bhagvata describes the mapping of the universe onto the body of purusha, primordial man.68
The Majma-ul-bahrain’s enterprise is a comparative one. It compares and draws relationships between the Indic and Islamic concepts discussed within its pages. Yet the work does not assume a neutral vantage point from which it weighs equally these two systems of thought. Rather, the project takes as its primary object of study the domain of Indic knowledge, which it seeks both to describe using its own vocabulary, as well as translate into Islamic, largely Sufi, categories.
The novelty of Dara’s project in the Majma lies in the connections that he draws between Indic and Islamic material discussed, rather than in the kinds of Indic knowledge that he introduces to his Persian readers. Several of the topics presented here on creation and cosmography had already been addressed by Mughal authors in some fashion, for instance, in the Ain-i Akbari. They also feature in the roughly contemporaneous Dabistan-i mazahib. These other works, however, aim to describe, enumerate, and categorize, outlining a range of Indic beliefs that are organized according to their school of thought. Though the Majma-ul-bahrain too regulates and organizes the knowledge it seeks to encapsulate, it also outlines its own monistic theology through the set of equivalences that it forges.
The umbrella category of muwahhidan-i hind, monotheists of India, allows the Majma a certain eclecticism in the concepts explored. Thus included within the purview of the collection are aspects of Nath yogic and some theistic strains of Vaishnava thought, as well as non-dualistic Vedanta. This eclectic collection is peppered with gleanings from the Yoga Vasishtha (about which we will read more in the next chapter), references to yogic meditation practices, and snippets of puranic cosmographies. Do these various strands point to the varying backgrounds and specializations of Dara Shukoh’s interlocutors? Individually, they point to diverse, if overlapping, systems of thought, but taken together they indicate the bodies of knowledge that, in mid-seventeenth-century Persianate culture, had come to be seen as representative of Indic learning. The Majma-ul-bahrain also captures a broader trend in the development of Indic thought: here we witness the gradual integration of disparate Nath and Vaishnava forms of knowledge into Vedanta, though this process had begun centuries earlier.
Yet perhaps the most striking feature of the Majma-ul-bahrain is the prominent role it gives to the Quran. Wherever possible, Dara quotes and elucidates Quranic verses as proof texts to demonstrate the validity of the Indic concepts he describes. The Quran is a primary locus of authority in the Majma-ul-bahrain, guiding its representations of Indic ideas and narratives. One way of interpreting Dara’s work is to view it as a ty
pe of scriptural commentary, albeit a nontraditional one, which builds upon methods developed in Sufi Quranic exegesis.
The Majma, like Dara’s earlier Risala-i Haqq-numa, is also a manual for spiritual liberation, though not explicitly so. As we have seen above, the prince summons the vocabulary of Islamic gnosis—kashf (unveiling) and zauq, which literally means a kind of mystical tasting or experience—to explain his relationship to the new knowledge that he has acquired. The Majma takes the form of a lexical compendium of analogies and equivalences between Sanskrit and Persian terms. Dara Shukoh believes that these reflected the same core ideas. Liberation, he implies, lies in understanding this essential sameness.
There are obvious parallels between Dara Shukoh’s project in the Majma-ul-bahrain and his great-grandfather Akbar’s embrace of Indic learning, though the prince avoids referring to Akbar here. Dara would also probably never acknowledge that his pursuits resonated with the kind of rulership a Deccan king enacted only a generation earlier. Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, who died in 1627, was an enthusiast of Indic music, dance, literature, and philosophy. Mughal royals tended to look down on these sultans of smaller kingdoms, derisively referring to them as “Deccan timeservers.”69 But the cultural productions of Ibrahim Adil Shah’s vibrant court rivaled those of the Mughals. One of the sultan’s own projects included a collection of songs that he composed, called the Kitab-i Nauras (Book of Nine Essences), arranged according to several different musical modes, or ragas. A couplet at the beginning praises the goddess Saraswati, and the first song eulogizes the prophet Muhammad.70
Coincidently, Shah Jahan too commissioned and curated a collection of Indian songs, also, like the Nauras, in the dhrupad style. The famous sixteenth-century musician Nayak Bakhshu, who worked at the courts of Gwalior and Gujarat, had composed several such songs in Brajbhasha. Shah Jahan ordered that Nayak Bakhshu’s prolific compositions be collected over a period of two years. Then, the emperor had these winnowed down to the thousand best ones. He also had the original patrons’ names changed out for his own. Much like Ibrahim Adil Shah, the Mughal ruler too saw musical connoisseurship as an important quality for a ruler.71
An eminent Persian litterateur at Ibrahim Adil Shah’s court, Nur-ud-din Muhammad Zuhuri, wrote three exquisitely ornate prose pieces, which formed a supplementary preface to the Nauras. They read, in the context of Shah Jahan’s court, as though they were composed for the emperor that Dara Shukoh wanted to become. In one of these, called Gulzar-i Ibrahim (Ibrahim’s Rose Garden), Zuhuri portrays the sultan as specially endowed with the insight to perceive divine unity where others see only the veils of multiplicity shrouding the divine countenance. His vision, then, guides his subjects. “The sacred thread (zunnar) has no such [weak] joint with the rosary, that its snapping laughs at the priest’s (kashish) wrangling. Between unbelief (kufr) and Islam there is no such secret that for [soothing] the latter’s headache, healing sandalwood is not taken from the Brahmin’s forehead.”72 Zuhuri’s intricate wording suggests that the Brahmin’s sacred thread shares a bond with the devout Muslim’s prayer beads so solid that no petty caviling about religious niceties can break it. Islam needs its antithesis, unbelief, just as a headache needs balm.
The ruler who accepts both Islam and unbelief can truly witness the divine revelation, just like Ali, the Prophet’s nephew and son-in-law and the first male to embrace Muhammad’s mission. Indeed, Zuhuri quotes the same line attributed to Ali to which Dara later implicitly alludes in the introduction to the Majma. The parallels between Zuhuri’s earlier description of his Sultan’s attributes and Dara Shukoh’s own vision of rulership were not merely a coincidence. Shah Jahan himself owned a collection of Zuhuri’s writings that included the Gulzar-i Ibrahim.73 Like Akbar, Ibrahim Adilshah exemplified how to successfully make one’s political theology central to one’s rule. Now, a generation later in the new city of Shahjahanabad, Dara Shukoh attempted to do the same.
8
THE GREATEST SECRET
1656–1657
AT SOME POINT DURING his intense study of Indic thought, Dara Shukoh had a dream. We do not know the date or precise year, but we know that it happened during or before 1066 AH (1655 / 6). It was not a common sort of dream, because it was significant enough to be recorded. The prince had witnessed special visions before, ones that involved his spiritual guide Miyan Mir. Here, too, Dara’s dream evoked a longer history of Muslim rulers who had visionary dreams and Muslim authors whose dreams legitimized their literary projects.1
Dreams of the Prophet Muhammad abound, like the vision that famously cured the blind poet Busiri of his blindness and led him to compose his celebrated Arabic ode on the mantle of the Prophet, the Qasidat-ul-burda, still recited today in countless commemorations of the Prophet’s birth. Learned men, too, could legitimize rulers through their appearances in dreams, like Aristotle, who materialized before the Abbasid caliph Mamun, as a rationale for the translation movement in Iraq.2 But Dara saw neither the Prophet nor an ancient Greek philosopher. He saw the Hindu sage Vasishtha along with the legendary prince Rama, believed to be the Hindu deity Vishnu descended on earth.
This dream was prompted by something the prince had recently read—a slim work of only a few handwritten pages. Its author was Dara’s contemporary Shaikh Sufi, who, as we remember, was a mystic and erstwhile Mughal official whom the Sufi writer Abd-ur-Rahman Chishti knew well and held in high regard. Shaikh Sufi claims that his book was a Persian translation of the Sanskrit Yogavasishtha, a work in the form of a dialogue between the legendary Rama, of Ramayana fame, and his teacher, Vasishtha. This dialogue is meant to have taken place while Rama was a young prince.3 The Persian text, as usual, follows the North Indian vernacular pronunciation of these names, which has Rama as “Ramchandra,” or “Ram” and Vasishtha as “Basisht.”
The Jog Basisht (Yogavasishtha) that Dara Shukoh had in mind was not so much one text but a whole textual tradition. There are many versions and abridgments of this work: from the tenth-century monistic Mokshopaya, to the Yogavasishtha Maharamayana layered with Advaita Vedanta and Rama devotion, to the Laghu Yogavasishtha, a medieval abridgment of the latter by the Kashmiri scholar Abhinanda.4 The version that Shaikh Sufi’s text is based on, the Yogavasishthasara, is even briefer than the other works. In the longer texts, Basisht relates an interlocking series of stories to Ram, but this version omits the stories.5 Apart from the Mokshopaya, these texts share the basic narrative frame: the prince Ram had become weary of this world and wanted to withdraw from it, but Basisht gradually guided him toward spiritual liberation of a type that he could attain while still remaining a ruler. Dara Shukoh did not particularly care for the shaikh’s translation, but the figures of Ram and Basisht stayed with him long enough to penetrate his sleep.
Upon seeing Basisht, the prince said, he immediately prostrated himself before the sage. Basisht spoke. “O Ramchandra! This is a disciple who is absolutely sincere, please embrace him.”
“With the utmost affection, Ram took me into his arms,” Dara relates. “Thereafter, Basisht gave Ramchandra sweets to feed me with. I ate the sweets.”6
Through words and actions, in the salutations and the giving of food, Basisht and Ram anointed Dara Shukoh as one of them, in much the same way that in his earlier visions, Miyan Mir imparted to him esoteric secrets heart-to-heart. But the prince saw Basisht and Ram as also ordaining him to perform an important task. The dream propelled Dara to carry out a translation project of his own. He would commission a translator to produce in Persian a new rendition of the Jog Basisht, one that was better than the version that Shaikh Sufi had made.
The prince leaves unmentioned the fact that previous Mughal rulers had also sponsored their own Persian renditions of the work. When his grandfather Jahangir was a prince, in 1597, he had the court litterateur Nizam Panipati collaborate with a couple of Sanskrit pandits to translate Abhinanda’s abridged Yogavasishtha into Persian.7 In 1602, Jahangir’s father, the emperor Akbar, had commissioned his ow
n translation of the abridged Yogavasishtha, carried out by one Farmuli, who self-deprecatingly identifies himself as the lowliest disciple of the poet-saint Kabir. Gorgeously illustrated with forty-one miniatures, the manuscript survives today. It bears Shah Jahan’s imperial seal and inscription dating from 1627/8, the year he came to the throne.8 The prince must surely have had access to this prized holding of the imperial library. Why then would he need a new translation?
By translating the Laghu Yogavasishtha anew, Dara Shukoh claimed the text for himself. Its argument that a prince could achieve full self-realization as an ascetic while acting as an exemplary ruler spoke directly to his own situation. It also continued a link to previous imperial engagements with the text by Jahangir and Akbar, the prince’s grandfather and great-grandfather. Dara’s dream of anointment fits into a broader imperial ideology that presented the emperor as a spiritual and temporal master of the world in decidedly Indic terms. Translation in the Mughal context had often been a way of asserting imperial authority. To translate a text that had been in India far longer than one’s celebrated ancestors was to sprout deeper roots in the subcontinent’s soil. It was also a way to mold this earth in new ways.
The translator, who relates Dara Shukoh’s dream in his introduction, does not mention his own name. Some manuscripts identify him as an otherwise unknown Habibullah, though this could just be a case of mistaking a scribe for the author.9 If so, he would be an uncommon, though not unique, example of a Muslim man of letters who also possessed a high level of expertise in Sanskrit and religious thought.
But stronger evidence lies in the Hindavi couplets drizzled throughout the Persian text. They provide the poet’s pen name “Wali,” the same that was adopted by Banwalidas, Dara’s former secretary and fellow Qadiri disciple. Banwalidas, as a Hindu scribe turned Sufi adept, had the multilingual ability that would enable him to carry out this project, though one suspects that he used the help of a pandit or two to access the Yogavasishtha rather than work directly from the Sanskrit. As a Kayasth, he did not have the same access to Sanskrit learning that a Brahmin might; his other writings also suggest as much.10 Banwalidas was doubly linked to Dara through his Qadiri discipleship to Mulla Shah and his imperial service, and he might have played an influential role in introducing the prince to the kinds of Hindu texts and ideas that already accorded with Sufi concepts of mystical gnosis.
The Emperor Who Never Was Page 26
