In 1900 Mirza Kalich Beg, celebrated as the first Sindhi novelist, translated a 13th- century Persian text called Chachnama into English. Ali Kufi, the author of Chachnama, in turn, claimed his work was a translation of an 8th-century work in Arabic. The English-language Chachnama is thus apparently twice removed from the ever-elusive original text, a rumoured book that deals with the conquest of Hindustan by Muhammad bin Qasim.
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Indian Economic and Social History Review. 49.4.
This article considers the reception and genre of the Shāhnāmah in India. It takes as its starting-point comments made by the poet Mirza Asad Allah Khan Ghalib in 1866, moving on to look at a Mughal Shāhnāmah adaptation, the Tarikh-i dil-gusha-i Shamsher-Khani, and its Urdu translations, as well as other Persian, Urdu and Arabic texts. It investigates the (mis)identification of the Shāhnāmah’s genre, looking at cases in which it was understood as historiographical rather than as a romance, and seeking an explanation for this ‘contamination’ of the sincere genre of history by the mendacious romance genre. A methodological split in the historiographical corpus is proposed, between a rationalist (‘aqli) and transmission-based (naqli) method. The contest between these two methods is considered, and the prevalence of transmission-based history and its similarity to romance is brought forward as a possible reason for the porousness of the border between these ostensibly opposing genres.
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History Today (Journal of History and Historical Archaeology)
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Indian Historical Review 2014/41 (June): 108-110
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This article presents the first in-depth textual analysis of the Razmnamah (Book of War), the Persian translation of the Mahabharata sponsored by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century. I argue that the Razmnamah was a central literary work in the Mughal court and of deep relevance to Akbar’s imperial and political ambitions. I pursue my analysis of the Mughal Mahabharata in two sections, focusing first on the work’s Sanskrit sources and then on the translation practices one finds evidenced in the Persian text. In the first section, I outline how the Mughal translators accessed Sanskrit materials and identify the Sanskrit texts that served as the basis for the Persian translation. This framework helps reconstruct the nature of the Mahabharata as the Mughals knew it and provides both the conceptual and literary tools needed to pursue comparative textual analysis. In the second section, I examine the text of the Razmnamah in comparison with its Sanskrit sources to highlight some of the Mughal translators’ key strategies in reimagining the epic in Persian. This close reading traces several literary paradigms that offer insight into the crucial role the Razmnamah played in the production and reproduction of Mughal imperial culture. Taken as a whole, my analysis argues that the Razmnamah was a crucial component of the politico-cultural fashioning of Akbar’s court, whereby the Mughals developed a new type of Indo-Persian imperial aesthetic.
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