Abstract
Sanskrit literature contains a dazzling array of poetry and prose, myths and legends, religion and philosophy, history and law. A. K. Warder’s Indian Kavya Literature (8 vols., 1972–2011) and Siegfried Lienhard’s A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit–Pali–Prakrit (1984) have surveyed this vast literature. Truschke takes a different approach, positioning her book between Chandra Prabha’s Historical Mahākāvyas in Sanskrit (1976) and Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya’s Representing the Other? (1998) or even Finbarr B. Flood’s Objects of Translation (2009). Truschke, like Prabha, engages in the close reading of key texts rather than a survey. Her analysis, like Chattopadhyaya and Flood, focuses on how Sanskrit historians represented Muslim rule.
Instead of a clash of civilisations, Truschke argues that Sanskrit historians followed literary traditions and their patron’s intellectual projects. The eleventh-century Buddhist Kālacakratantra, for example, promoted Buddhism over Islam by noting that Muslims sacrificed animals (like Brahmins in Vedic rituals) and commented on some core Islamic beliefs. While contemporary Muslims al-Biruni and Shahrastani engaged in comparative religion, Buddhists produced a cosmology that explained Muslim expansion as the final act of a degenerate time leading to a new Buddhist age (p. 37). Muslims—and Hindus in this example—acted as a Buddhist Other. Political inscriptions show a similar pattern. Sanskrit historians focused on political lineages (Chahamana, Rashtrakuta, Chola) that highlighted a Hindu ruler’s ancestors but referred to Muslim rulers by their ethnicity (turuṣka or tājika) rather than a political dynasty such as Ghaznavid (p. 34). Established metaphors and tropes, rather than religion, achieved the text’s objective.
This blend of literary tradition and intellectual project occurred in the Pṛthvīrājavijaya (ca. 1200), the main text of the second chapter. Muslims were depicted as demons feasting on the blood of horses unable to speak the courtly language of Sanskrit, common tropes describing enemies and foreigners. The Pṛthvīrājavijaya ended, as many have noted, with the Hindu king’s victory that ignored his defeat by Muslims the next year. Truschke tacks from this argument by focusing on the role of Pushkar. The Puskhar attack reframed the story from a defeated king to a threatened landscape (pp. 49, 53–4) as it reinforced the kingly duties of protecting pilgrimages and the social order, just rule and valiant warfare.
Little changed during the Delhi Sultanate as discussed in the third chapter with the Madhurāvijaya (ca. 1380) celebrating Vijayanagara’s defeat of the Madurai Sultanate and the Hammīramahākāvya (ca. 1410) on the fall of Ranthambhor in 1300. Arabic words such as sulṭān (Skt suratrāṇa) and amīr (Skt hammīra), present in previous centuries, took on new political significance as historians incorporated Muslim rule into Sanskrit literature. Yet Muslims once again followed established Sanskrit tropes. Vijayanagara’s defeat of the Hindu Sambuvaraya dynasty (discussed by Truschke, pp. 77–8, 84–5) and Hammira’s defeat of the Hindu Paramaras (implied but not discussed) contain the same amount of gore as Hindu–Muslim battles (p. 22). Muslims entered the story but did not change the narrative.
This began to change with a shift from royal to regional histories, most notably Jain prabandha literature and the Kashmiri Rājataraṅgiṇī cycle, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Jain authors in Gujarat focused on the destruction of pilgrimage sites and how later Muslims, especially regional sultans, reconstructed these sites. Authors addressed Jain concerns, but Muslims finally gained some agency as historical actors rather than literary characters. Kalhana, author of the first Rājataraṅgiṇī (1149), similarly focused on the ancient history of Kashmiri Brahmins with passing references to Muslim raids, but far more interesting is Shrivara, author of the third Rājataraṅgiṇī (1486), who noted the rising power of the Baihaqi Sayyids (pp. 122–4) along with Islamic beliefs, burial customs dietary restrictions and other Muslim practices (pp. 124–30). This is a minor part of Shrivara’s Rājataraṅgiṇī, as Truschke notes, but also the first analysis of Islamic belief in Sanskrit since the Kālacakratantra.
Truschke states that her book is chronological for the pre-Mughals and thematic for the Mughals (p. 24). I would argue that the chapters mirror each other, analysing political history, warfare and regional differences for the Sultanate Period (chapters 2–4) followed by regional differences, warrior identity and political history for the Mughals (chapters 5–7).
Sixteenth-century Sanskrit authors shifted from observers to participants of Mughal rule. This is illustrated through the colourful life of Hiravijaya, a Jain monk in Akbar’s royal court, who alternately fought and complied with Mughal whims. When Hiravijaya refused Akbar’s attempt to bestow a Sanskrit library to the monk, an attachment to the material world, the slight was resolved with the donation to another Jain for Hiravijaya’s use. Truschke shows how the Hiravijaya cycle of stories reconciled Jain beliefs with Mughal rule. The tensions, however, remained uneasy and Jains eventually renounced their connection to the Mughal court.
Rajput and Maratha warriors also reimagined their relationship with the Mughals. Truschke begins the sixth chapter by reminding the reader that, contrary to popular perception, Rajputs and Marathas fought against and alongside Muslim armies. The Surjanacarita (ca. 1590s) and Rāṣṭrauḍhavaṃśamahākāvya (1596) negotiated this conflict by advancing a Hindu kingship and warrior identity that flourished within the Mughal system. Shivaji advanced his kingship as a Mughal ally yet fought the Mughals to prove his military prowess. The Sūryavaṃśa (ca. 1675) labelled Rajputs and Marathas who fought alongside the Muslims as yavana (lit., Ionian, but also any foreigner) demonstrating that these divisions were political rather than religious (pp. 179–81).
This political thread continues in the final chapter on Sanskrit authors rewriting Mughal imperial histories, particularly Abu’l Fazl’s work, in the Jagadgurukāvya (1589) and Sarvadeśavṛttāntasaṅgraha (after 1598). Truschke meticulously demonstrates how Persian concepts were understood and translated into Sanskrit. These histories, notably the Nṛpatinītigarbhitavṛtta (ca. 1720), delighted in blending and manipulating Persian and Sanskrit words and imagery. All three works were centred on the Mughals and their nobility in stark contrast to the peripheral role Muslims played in the Pṛthvīrājavijaya (chapter 2).
Truschke demonstrates how Sanskrit historians approached the Hindu and Muslim encounter over nearly a millennium. Sanskrit historians began by interpreting Muslims according to established literary motifs, eventually used Muslim rule and armies as a foil to Hindu kings and warriors, and finally created a liminal space between the two literary traditions. Her book joins a growing chorus of scholarship examining the Hindu–Muslim encounter in the pre-modern and early modern periods. She is blazing a trail for a new type of pre-modern scholar who straddles the Sanskrit/Persian, Indic/Muslim divide. Her book is a welcomed voice and achievement that is long overdue.