A Little Known Book Offers A Cautionary Tale On The 'Us Versus Them' Ideology

Mughal Samrat Akbar Aur Sanskrit, the first two volumes of a remarkable book, was published nearly a decade ago (in 2012), and a third, slim volume was published in 2019. Pratap Kumar Mishra, a young Sanskrit scholar, wrote all three volumes, which were published by the Akhil Bharatiya Muslim-Sanskrit Sarankshan evam Prachya Shodh Sansthan in Varanasi. The book comes before the current politically motivated campaign to portray the Mughals as "plunderers of India's wealth" and "destroyers of religion and culture." The three-volume, densely researched work, which contains over 1,000 tightly printed pages in total, serves as a cautionary reminder against viewing history in black-and-white terms of Hindu versus Muslim.

Mishra attributes Akbar's patronage to 36 Sanskrit Brahmin pundits. After a brief overview of Akbar's life and the religious climate in the court, including a discussion of Ibadat Khana, Mishra focuses on the central theme of his work. Akbar established a translation bureau, which translated 14 of Sanskrit's most venerable works, including the Atharvaveda and Ramayan, into Persian. Under Akbar's orders, 12 separate Sanskrit works were written, including Persian language grammar, a thousand names of the Sun, Allopanishad, and more. Mishra has reproduced part one of Abu'l Fazl's Akbar Nama, which was also translated into Sanskrit. For political symbolism, Akbar did not need to go to such lengths; a couple of examples would have sufficed. Understanding and empathizing with the people he ruled was crucial to his vision of governance. Indeed, as Truschke so eloquently argued, from 1560 onwards, this vision inspired the Mughal state and its court culture for nearly a century. Despite minor typos and subpar production values, the magnitude of Mishra's effort merits praise and gratitude.