Abstract
Abstract In the late sixteenth century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar sponsored the translation of more than one dozen Sanskrit texts into Persian, chief among them the Mahābhārata. The epic was retitled the Razmnāma (Book of War) in Persian and rapidly became a seminal work of Mughal imperial culture. Within the Razmnāma, the Mughal translators devoted particular attention to sections on political advice. They rendered book twelve (out of eighteen books), the Śānti Parvan (Book of Peace), into Persian at disproportionate length to the rest of the text and singled out parts of this section to adorn with quotations of Persian poetry. Book twelve also underwent significant transformations in terms of its content as Mughal thinkers reframed the Mahābhārata’s views on ethics and sovereignty in light of their own imperial interests. I analyze this section of the Razmnāma in comparison to the original Sanskrit epic and argue that the Mughal translators reformulated parts of the Mahābhārata’s political advice in both style and substance in order to speak directly to Emperor Akbar. The type of advice that emerged offers substantial insight into the political values that Mughal elites sought to cultivate through translating a Sanskrit work on kingship.
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