By Sunil Kumar
In the Rajdhani, the ‘so-called’ graveyard of empires. The Puranic Indraprastha or Dillika. Received an invite to a lecture on a fascinating topic by a research scholar Mohsin Ali on ‘Dara Shikoh and the Yoga Vasishta’.
Dr. Ravi Mishra, the director of the PMML talked about the long history of translations of Sanskrit texts from the Greco-Roman world to the 17th century and the times of Dara Shikoh. Texts such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Panchatantra were bandied about. A surprising fact was the 4 times Islamic scholars translated the Yoga Vasishta.
Rumi, the new age darling of the aesthete was mentioned as having praised ‘Hindustan’ and the Veda vriksha -the tree of knowledge and the Brahman, adhyatma and many of the concepts of the Indic philosophies. However, the jury is still out on Rumi as according to some sources, he was a toxic hater of infidels- read Hindus. and other faiths.
Akbar was also mentioned by Mr. Mohsin as having commissioned the translation of the Panchatantra thrice. The Yoga Vasishta was translated by Nizam al-Din Panipati as the Jug Basisht. An abridged version by Abhinanda of Kashmir known as the Laghu Vasishta which has 6000 verses compared to the prolixity of the 29000 verse translation was supposedly the basis of the translation.
Some problems in translation were mentioned as the world view of Islam influenced Persian and the profundity of Samskritam and its cultural context had to be surmounted to make sense to a target audience. Dr. Mishra also talked about the heresy implicit in the world-view of Akbar and Dara Shikoh when it came to the hardcore traditionalist interpretation. Iqbal, that polemic poet and his praise of Aurangzeb in the Hikayat-e-Sher-O-Shahanshah were mentioned. Could sense the subtle interplay and exchange of ideas where criticism was not overt and there was a scholarly, civil exchange of ideas that I liked.
The dreams of Dara Shikoh were discussed where he supposedly had visions of Sage Vasishta and Bhagavan Rama. Also listened to speculations about the Sufi silsila tradition of taking permission from the August figures on whom poetic works are conceived.
My questions to Mohsin and Dr. Mishra were more on the lines of the Lord Rama story where an alternative story which I read which mentioned Shikoh believing that he was Lakshmana, whether any other translation was commissioned post Dara Shikoh and the latter declining half of the Mughals starting with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. I also wanted to know what elements of Yoga Vasishta remained in the Islamic mindscape before transmission to the post-Enlightenment West.
An interesting discussion with Dr. Mishra followed where he contrasted the pre-modern Mughal empire and the relatively more sophisticated manipulation of the British and the Macaulay based education system. All in all, a fruitful insightful discussion on the maverick outlier of the Mughal empire and one of the most profound texts of the Indic Darshana tradition.
