Translation at the Confluence of Two Worlds: The Realignment of Islamic and Hindu Monotheisms in Dārā Shokūh’s Majmaʿ ol-Baḥrayn

Prince Dārā Shokūh’s Majmaʿ ol-baḥrayn (1655) has long been celebrated as one of the most outstanding works of comparative religion in Mughal India. Mindful of Dārā Shokūh’s role as a patron and practioner of translation from Sanskrit to Persian, in this paper we propose to consider this particular work as centrally preoccupied with translation in an extended sense. By this we mean not translation from one language into another, but rather the translation of what could be called conceptual schemes. We will take seriously Dārā Shokūh’s own practice, in particular his use of the term taṭbīq – “comparison”, or, more aptly in this case, “alignment” – in order to demonstrate that Dārā Shokūh’s project of realigning certain conceptual schemes of Islamic and Hindu monotheisms may have served as a precondition for successful translation in the ordinary sense of the word. Importantly, we believe Dārā Shokūh intended that his practice of realignment not leave the translator, or the beneficiaries of translation, unchanged. As Tony Stewart has shown in his pioneering work on the interaction between Islamic and Vaiṣṇava Hindu traditions in early-modern Bengal, correspondences between religious concepts may be constructively analysed through the lens of modern translation theory. In a similar spirit, we hope to show that the Majmaʿ ol-baḥrayn was intended by Dārā Shokūh to be a deep grammar for conceptual translation, and was perhaps even projected by him to serve as a template for such endeavors in cultural translation. Certainly Dārā Shokūh’s remarkable vision of the alignments necessary for cultural translation is not without relevance today.