1: Mughal Poetry and Embedded Political Advice: Masīḥ’s Persian Ramayana

Persian translations of Sanskrit texts from the early Mughal period (1556-1707) are considered by many scholars today to have provided Indic models for kingship for their patrons, as they were parts of greater endeavors taken by several Mughal princes and emperors to fashion themselves politically as Indo-Persian rulers. This argument has been examined to some extent in recent years in the context of unornate, informational, prose translations. This paper, however, seeks to explore models of kingship and political advice provided by Persian poetic renditions of the Sanskrit epics, and more specifically, Masīḥ’s 17th century versified Persian Mathnawi-i Rām u Sītā. The analysis offered in this paper focuses on the story of king Sagara and the events that led to the Ganges descending from the heavens to earth.

Persian poetic retellings of Sanskrit literature have long been seen as free, inaccurate translations, which take poetic licenses in a way that does injustice to the source texts. In this paper I argue that Masīḥ, as well as other poets who reworked the epics into Persian, saw faithfulness to the source texts not as their goal but rather as a point of departure for an elaborate creative process. This approach to poetic translation allowed these poets to demonstrate their poetic skills and originality as well as to pour new content into their poems and thus to cleverly combine various cultural discourses on kingship, politics, and territorial imagination. The outcome was a fresh poetic expression conveying fresh, Indo-Persian, models of kingship.