Satoshi Ogura

This essay explores the forms of political legitimacy claimed by Muslim sultans and received by their Muslim and non-Muslim subjects in sultanate and early Mughal Kashmir. The establishment of the Shahmirid sultanate in 1339 marked the beginning of a new multilingual situation where Sanskrit and Persian were both used as official languages. In such a situation, presentation of the Shahmirids’ political legitimacy took different forms depending on the language in which it was made. Shahmirid sultans declared their Indic legitimacy in Sanskrit and Islamic legitimacy in Persian. A polyglot chose the Indic legitimacy to praise the contemporary sultan in his Sanskrit writing with full knowledge of the Islamic legitimacy claimed by the same sultan. In such a situation, a ruler’s action that was deeply linked with his claim of legitimacy, e.g., Akbar’s sun-veneration could be interpreted differently by the observers depending on the language used to express their interpretations.

The Nūrbakhshiyya is a ṣūfī order named after Sayyid Muḥammad Nūrbakhsh (d. 869/1464). The order flourished between the late ninth/fifteenth and early eleventh/seventeenth centuries, chiefly in Iran and Kashmir. Communities of Nūrbakhshīs have survived in pockets of Baltistan in Pakistan and in some areas of Ladakh in India.

Ogura, Satoshi, 2020, "Rājataraṅgiṇī", Perso-Indica. An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, F. Speziale - C. W. Ernst, eds., available at http://www.perso-indica.net/work/rajatarangini_%28zayn_al-abidin_translation%29.

The Moġūl military chief Mīrzā Muḥammad Ḥaydar Duġlāt first made a campaign in Kashmir in the late autumn of 1532 CE as a chief commander of Sulṭān Sa‘īd Ḫān of the Moġūlistān Khanate, and stayed in the valley until that following spring. Seven years later, in 1540, Mīrzā Ḥaydar set forth again from Lahore to conquer Kashmir in response to an invitation by Kashmiri indigenous potentates. After taking control in early 1541, he spent his last ten years in the valley. Mīrzā Ḥaydar’s first campaign and days of de facto rule with a puppet sulṭān were recorded by four Sanskrit and Persian sources from Kashmir, which were composed beginning in the early sixteenth century until the first quarter of the seventeenth century. This paper provides a Japanese translation of these four sources from Kashmir that refer to Mīrzā Ḥaydar’s activity in the valley, demonstrating new findings that have not been discussed in previous studies, as follows: 1) the Rājataraṅgiṇī of Śuka contributes to restoring the route in Kashmir that Moġūls took over during the 1532¬¬-33 campaign, and identifying the location where the Moġūls and Kashmiri troops battled. 2) The Appendix B and the Bahāristan-i Šāhī describe Mīrzā Ḥaydar’s unstable sovereignty over indigenous potentates in the early 1540s. In addition, the latter source further narrates an episode of his compromising attitude toward the Nūrbaḫšiyya owing to his unstable sovereignty. 3) The Tārīḫ-i Kašmīr of Sayyid ‘Alī and the Bahāristan-i Šāhī both provided the date of Mīrzā Ḥaydar’s death: Ḏū al-Qa‘da 7 or 8, 957 Hijri/November 17 or 18, 1550. This date is about one year earlier than the date of his death that has been generally accepted in previous studies as 958/1551.

The Intiḫāb-i Tārīḫ-i Kašmīr is an abridged chronicle of Kashmir composed by an anonymous author during the period of the fourth Mughal emperor Ǧahāngīr. It includes accounts of the legend of Kashmir’s creation, the deeds of rulers from Gonanda I to Sultan Šams al-Dīn II in 1538, and Akbar’s annexation of the valley in 1586. This work is most likely identical with the Persian abridged history of Kashmir mentioned by François Bernier in his travelogue. In my 2011 paper, I assumed this work was abridged from Muḥammad Ḥusayn’s Persian translation of the Rājataraṅgiṇīs completed in 1618, which Ḥaydar Malik relied on in writing his Tārīḫ-i Kašmīr. However, a perusal of the manuscript of the Bodleian Library, Fraser 160, reveals that this work is identical to Muḥammad Ḥusayn’s translation, whose text is later than that of the Intiḫāb-i Tārīḫ-i Kašmīr.
After the introduction, in section 2, based on this new finding, I reconstruct the processes of textual transmission from the Rājataraṅgiṇīs to Ḥaydar Malik’s Tārīḫ-i Kašmīr, in which the Intiḫāb-i Tārīḫ-i Kašmīr is re-located in the process of the textual transmission as an abridged text from a revised edition of Muḥammad Šāhābādī’s Persian translation completed in Akbar’s lifetime.
In section 3 then, I present the collated text of the Intiḫāb-i Tārīḫ-i Kašmīr with annotations on variants.

In 1589, Mullā Shāh Muḥammad Shāhābādī translated a series of Sanskrit metrical chronicles from Kashmir ─ the Rājataraṅgiṇīs of Kalhaṇa, Jonarāja, Śrīvara, and Śuka ─ into Persian under the royal order of the third Mughal Emperor Akbar. The translation primarily traces and delivers each Sanskrit verse of the original Rājataraṅgiṇīs in Persian prose, and shortens the introductory parts of each source. Translating various concepts of Sanskrit culture in the source texts, Shāhābādī employed a wide range of translation strategies, including equivalence theories and the skopos theory. This paper provides the first detailed comparative analysis of Shāhābādī's Persian translation of the Rājataraṅgiṇīs with its counterparts ─ the Sanskrit source texts ─ , focusing on how he translated political, astronomical, and religious concepts of Sanskrit culture. The major findings of this paper are as follows: a) When translating titles of rulers, Shāhābādī generally uses the two words, rāja and sulṭān, properly depending on whether a ruler was non-Muslim or Muslim, respectively, while names of official ranks are translated into those of Muslim dynasties, in particular, of the Mughal Empire. b) When translating dates of historical events, he interprets the names of Nakṣatra

The Rājataraṅgiṇīs of Jonarāja, Śrīvara, and Śuka, the sequels to Kalhaṇa’s famous Sanskrit chronicle compiled under the rule of the first Muslim dynasty in Kašmīr, the Šāhmīrids (1339-1561), are valuable contemporary records from the point of view of Brahmans in an Islamizing society in medieval South Asia. This paper aims to examine the authors’ representations of Muslims. It particularly focuses on the usage of the terms such as ‘Yavana,’ ‘Mleccha,’ ‘Turuṣka,’ and ‘Mausula.’
    Jonarāja principally depicts the people to whom the terms are applied as destroyers of Brahmanic social and moral order. Although his chronicle has a few accounts which seem to describe Muslims as believers in Islām, they are too vague for us to understand the extent of his comprehension of Islām. Śrīvara’s references to Muslims are abundant. Based on his substantial knowledge of Islām, he contrasts Islām with the unified six darśanas. Śuka’s representations are less concrete than those of Śrīvara. Presumably, the cultural and political situation in Kašmīr in the fifteenth century stimulated Śrīvara to be aware of the differences between Islām and what he and other non-Muslims believed.

Before the annexation of Kashmir to the Muġal Empire in 1586, two Muslim dynasties, the Šāhmīrid (1339–1561) and the Čakid (1561–1586) ruled the region. Under the rule of these two dynasties, Sanskrit was used as the languages of cultural activities—in addition to Persian. As is well known, the eighth sultan of the Šāhmīrid Zayn al-‘Ābidīn (r. 1418/1420–1470) promoted the translation of Sanskrit classics into Persian and revived the tradition of Sanskrit historiography. Surely the Šāhmīri court had both some Pandits who were skilled in Persian and some Muslim intellectuals who had knowledge of Sanskrit. Moreover, the presence of a bilingual document and bilingual inscriptions of tombstones suggests that such multilingual literacy came to be spread among the public to a certain extent.
    In the linguistic cosmopolitanism of Kashmir of the period, Muslim rulers of Šāhmīri sultanate proclaimed multiple political legitimacies depending on languages. The Sanskrit inscriptions and texts narrate their Indic legitimacy, while the numismatic sources which have Arabic and Persian phrases attest that they were orthodox Sunni rulers.
    As long as the author perused utilizable sources, it seems that both Muslims and non-Muslims who had multilingual literacy were aware of the difference of religions. A Muslim chronicler, on the one hand, notwithstanding his use of Sanskrit text as primary sources, clearly did not accept non-Islamic religions. A Brahman who was skilled in Persian, on the other hand, regarded Islām as a true religion and recognized the importance of Qur’ān and Ḥadīṯ. His view seems to represent a sort of “Religious Pluralism.”