Routes of Translation: Connected Book Histories and al-Jazari’s Robotic Wonders from the Mamluks to Mandu

Abstract

Over the course of the long fifteenth century, scholars and books moved across regions and spurred transcreations of numerous Islamicate manuscripts in South Asia. This essay undertakes a close reading of an early sixteenth-century Persian transcreation—that is, a translation in both form and content—of a twelfth-century Arabic compendium on mechanical devices. I examine what the historical event of translation in the South Asian region of Malwa and town of Mandu meant as it is read amidst cultural flows between Mamluk Egypt, Yemen, Mecca, and Hindustan. By analyzing the colophons of early Arabic copies of al-Jazari’s Compendium of Theory and Useful Practice for the Fabrication of Machines along with Da’ud Shadiyabadi’s Wonders of Mechanics in Persian, this study demonstrates how Shadiyabadi’s translation distances itself from al-Jazari’s book. As Shadiyabadi’s Wonders of Mechanics becomes the standard Persian translation of al-Jazari—appearing in subsequent Mughal and Iranian copies—the work of a scholar from a small North-Central Indian court links scholars, sultanates, and regions.