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Translating the ‘Other’: Early-Modern Muslim Understandings of Hinduism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2017

SHER ALI TAREEN
SHER ALI TAREEN*
Affiliation:
Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay examines the theme of inter-religious translation in the context of early modern India. More specifically, it considers the prominent 18th century Sufi master and scholar Mirzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān's (d.1781) translation of Hindu thought and practice as reflected in his Persian letters on this subject. Through a close reading of the content and context of his translation project, I show that while according the Hindu ‘other’ remarkable doctrinal hospitality, Jān-i Jānān's view of translation was firmly tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology committed to upholding the exceptionality of Muslim normative authority. Interrogating his negotiation of hospitality and exceptionality and the notions of time that undergirded that negotiation occupies much of this essay. I also explore ways in which Jān-i Jānān's translation of Hinduism might engage ongoing scholarly conversations regarding the rupture of colonial modernity in the discursive career of religion in South Asia. In the Euro-American study of religion, many scholars have shown the intimacy of modern secular power and the reconfiguration of religion as a universally translatable category. But what conceptual and historiographical gains might one derive by shifting the camera of analysis from the colonial reification of religion to the inter-religious translation efforts of a late 18th century thinker like Jān-i Jānān who wrote at the cusp of colonial modernity? This question hovers over the problem-space of this essay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 435 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2017 

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References

1 Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993)Google Scholar.

2 For perhaps the most convincing and thorough articulation of this argument, see Mandair, Arvind, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 I use the term ‘Hinduism’ here, as I do throughout this article when describing Jān-i Jānān's views, rather reluctantly, and primarily for heuristic purposes. As I discuss later, the positing in the eighteenth century of a clearly demarcated world religion called ‘Hinduism’ involves a fair number of problems and ambiguities.

4 For instance, Aziz Ahmad, I. H. Qureshi, I. M. Ikram and to a certain extent Fazlur Rahman are notable members of this camp. This list is, of course, by no means exhaustive.

5 Imtiaz Ahmad, Sarvelli Gopal and Mushirul Hassan are all good examples.

6 See, for instance, the collection of essays in Gopal, Sarvelli, Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi Issue (New Delhi, 1991)Google Scholar.

7 James Laine, unpublished paper on file with author. The examples of scholars cited here are my own.

8 For instance, see Lawrence, Bruce and Gilmartin, David, Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville, 2000)Google Scholar and Laine, James., Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Jān-i Jānān was Mirzā Maẓhar's poetic epithet. But since he is most well known as Jān-i Jānān, I use this name throughout this article.

10 Friedmann, Yohanan, “Muslim views of Indian religions”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, VC, (April–June 1975), pp. 214–221 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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27 Ibid .

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36 Ernst, ‘Muslim interpreters’, p. 66.

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39 The question of the ‘other's’ salvation has remained a much contested and debated problem throughout Muslim intellectual history that has occupied the imagination of several major scholars and espoused a variety of responses and meditations. For more on that topic, see Khalil, Mohammad, Islam and the Fate of Others: The Salvation Question (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Dahnhardt, Thomas, Change and Continuity in Indian Sufism (New Delhi, 2002), pp. 10–11 Google Scholar.

41 For purposes of this article, I have relied on Jān-i Jānān's original letter in Persian that appears in Qamar ul-Dīn Murādābādī’s 1891 collection of Jān-i Jānān's discourses, Kalimāt-i Ṭayyibāt. The Urdu translation of this letter is available in Maqāmāt-i Maẓharī that was compiled by Shāh Ghulām ‘Alī Dihlavī and edited and translated by Muḥammad Iqbāl Mujaddidī. I have elsewhere translated (with a commentary) the Urdu translation; see Tareen, SherAli, “The perils and possibilities of inter-religious translation: Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan on the Hindus”, Sagar: A South Asia Research Journal, XXI, (May 2014), pp. 43–51 Google Scholar.

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43 Persian for Vedas.

44 Murādābādī, Kalimāt-i Ṭayyibāt, pp. 27–28.

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46 Ibid ., p. 28.

47 Ibid .

48 Ibid .

49 Ibid .

50 Ibid .

51 Ibid .

52 Qur'an 35:24; Muhammad Asad translation.

53 Qur'an 10:47. Muhammad Asad translation.

54 Murādābādī, Kalimāt-i Ṭayyibāt, p. 28.

55 Ibid .

56 Qur'an, 40:78.

57 Murādābādī, Kalimāt-i Ṭayyibāt, p. 28.

58 Ibid ., p. 29

59 Ibid .

60 Ibid . Literally meaning ‘like a stick’, the practice of dand'vat represents a Hindu salutation involving falling, lying prostrate or bowing before a person or an entity. It usually signifies the recognition of moral authority in a situation that demands the expression of such respect.

61 Ibid .

62 See Buehler, Arthur, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia, SC, 1998.)Google Scholar

63 Friedmann, Yohanan, “Muslim views of Indian religions”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, XC, (April–June 1975), p. 221 Google Scholar.

64 Ibid .

65 Dihlavī and Mujaddidī, Maqāmāt, pp. 101 and 127.

66 See for instance Mandair, Arvind, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Translation (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dalmia, Vasudha, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar; Frykenberg, Robert “Constructions of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXIII: 3 (Winter 1993), pp. 523–550 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oberoi, Harjot, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar.

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68 Carl Ernst, ‘Muslim studies of Hinduism’, p.1. For a fuller view on Ernst's formidable research on this topic, see the collection of essays in Ernst, Carl, Refractions of Islam in India: Situating Sufism and Yoga (New Delhi, 2016)Google Scholar.

69 Ibid .

70 Viswanathan, Gauri, “Colonialism and the construction of Hinduism”, in Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, (ed.) Flood, Gavin (Oxford, 2003), p. 38 Google Scholar.

71 Mandair, Arvind, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York, 2009), pp. 45–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Ibid .

73 Ibid., pp. 175–240.

74 Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Quoted in Ibid ., p.41.

76 Quoted in Friedrich, Hugo, “On the art of translation” in Schulte, Rainer and Biguenet, John (eds), Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 12–13 Google Scholar.

77 Ibid., p.14.

78 Quoted in Ibid .

79 I would like to thank Carl Ernst, Ebrahim Moosa, Bruce Lawrence, James Laine, Barton Scott and Hoda Yousef, also the peer reviewers for comments on this essay. I also benefited from participation in the 2013 National Endowment for Humanities Institute on Translation in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: I thank the institute organisers Chris Higgins, Elizabeth McCoy and all participants for their stimulating conversations. I also presented different versions of this essay at the American Academy of Religion Meeting, Annual South Asia Conference. I thank all respondents and audience members at these venues for their feedback and comments.