Dear colleagues,
With apologies for the self-promotion -- but hoping to do right by a wonderful press that generously poured so many of its own resources into it -- I am pleased to announce the publication of my book, Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press). I am grateful that UC Press has made the book widely accessible through a free open-access download (link below), with print copies also available in paperback.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520345683
The book description is below. Please feel free to download and share.
With many thanks,
Shankar Nair
Assistant Professor
Department of Religious Studies and
Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures
University of Virginia
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During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes and exchanges that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha—an influential Sanskrit philosophical tale whose popularity stretched across the subcontinent—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars drew upon their respective religious, philosophical, and literary traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange and interreligious and cross-philosophical dialogue significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.