The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

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  IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF 1657. Dara Shukoh was once again fired with enthusiasm for a new translation project. This time, he would himself be closely involved in the process. He had discovered a text he believed to express truths about God’s unity like no other—the key to unlocking divine mysteries that would otherwise remain hidden. Or rather, it was a collection of works, which the prince treated as one sacred book—the Upanishads, Sanskrit sacred texts which form part of the larger corpus associated with the four Vedas. Scholars tend to date the earliest Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka and the Chhandogya, to the sixth or seventh century BCE, while some of the other Upanishads that Dara Shukoh translated can be dated to as late as the fourteenth century.37 No previous Mughal royal had ever translated the Upanishads. The emperor Akbar had once asked the irascible litterateur Badayuni to translate the Atharva Veda into Persian, but the text does not seem to have survived.38

  To carry out his ambitious project, Dara Shukoh summoned to Shahjahanabad a group of Sanskrit scholars from Benares. For six months he worked with them at his mansion near the Yamuna River’s Nigambodh ghat, perhaps in the second building now known as his library.39

  If we add just a dash of imagination to the details in Dara’s own account, we might picture the following scene: The Benares pandits assemble on the floor of a hall. Piled amongst them are various long oblong bundles of Sanskrit manuscripts, written on palm leaves. Approximately fifty Upanishads are eventually selected for translation, perhaps fifty-two, mirroring the number of letters in the Nagari alphabet. The prince inaugurates the proceedings by performing an augury with the Quran. He opens up the holy book at random and finds this verse: “Alif. Lam. Mim. Sad. (It is) a Scripture that is revealed unto you, so let there be no misgiving in your heart from it, that you may warn by it, a Reminder unto believers.”40 Commentators on the Quran believe that these words, prefaced by the mysterious letters that begin some of the Quran’s suras, were addressed to the prophet Muhammad instructing him not to have any fear or doubt about the divine revelation.

  It is a felicitous time to start. A pandit reads out a Sanskrit passage, and another gives its meaning in Hindavi. They communicated in Hindavi, we gather, for the Sanskrit words mentioned in Dara’s translation are given in their vernacular forms. Frequently the pandits refer to commentaries if they are available, like those on the twelve major Upanishads attributed to the famous eighth-century philosopher Shankara. From time to time, Dara Shukoh interjects with a question. A secretary helps the prince record the proceedings under his watchful scrutiny, as had happened during Dara’s dialogues with Baba Lal. In the course of these exchanges, the Sanskrit verses eventually transform into rough Persian prose, which is refined over time. The prince and the pandits work through the chilly winter and the searing summer until the beginning of the monsoon.

  After six months the voluminous collection is complete. It is the middle of the summer and the Islamic month of Ramazan is nearing its end. Just as with his first two books, Dara finished this work as the holy month of fasting drew to a close. One manuscript records the date of completion as the twenty-ninth of Ramazan, which, along with other odd-numbered days at the end of the month, is associated with the Lailat-ul-Qadr, the night when the Quran was first revealed to the Prophet.41

  Dara writes a preface that collapses his entire life’s work into a quest for the source of true monotheism. He recounts that even after reading and composing numerous books on Sufism, subtle concerns lingered in his mind. These could only be resolved through recourse to the divine word, though the Quran—God’s revelation to the Prophet Muhammad—abounded in allegory, and those who understood its mysteries were so few! But had not God revealed more than one Book, each a commentary of the other, one explicating in detail where the other is ambiguous?

  The scriptures of the people of the Book, though—the Torah, Gospel, and Psalms—did not satisfy the prince. They too were diffusive and allegorical, made even more obscure by the translations that selfish people had made of their works. (Was Dara Shukoh making a dig at Father Busée or Sarmad here?) He realized that he need look no further than his homeland, India, for a deeper understanding of divine unity. In his view, Indian scholars “do not reject unity, nor do they find fault with the unity-affirmers, rather, it is the foundation of their belief.” Dara contrasts them with the “ignoramuses of today, who have established themselves as religious scholars and have fallen upon criticizing, tormenting, and naming as infidels the God-knowers and unity-affirmers.”42 The prince then discovers the Upanishads, “in which are contained all the secrets of the mystical path and meditative exercises of pure divine unity.” He describes his project thus:

  As this self-examining truth seeker had in view the original unity of the essence, not the Arabic, nor Syriac, Hebrew, and Sanskrit languages, he desired to translate these Upnikhats, which are the treasury of divine unity, those who know it even in that community being few, into the Persian language, without additions or deletions or selfish motives, with the utmost accuracy, word for word, in order to understand what secret lies in it that this community conceals it and keeps it hidden so from the people of Islam.43

  Dara Shukoh repeats the idea of the secret, which also references a Sanskrit meaning for the word “Upanishad,” in the title of his translation. He calls it the Sirr-i akbar, which means, “The Greatest Secret.”44 There is a double edge to this enigma though, because for Dara this secret also reveals the hidden message of the Quran. The full import of the prince’s project becomes clearer. Referring to himself in the customary third person, Dara explains:

  Each problem, and each lofty word that he had wanted, and of which he was the seeker, and had sought and not found, he obtained from that quintessence of the ancient book, which is, without doubt the first heavenly scripture, the font of truth-realization, ocean of divine unity, in agreement with the glorious Quran, and, not only that but its exegesis. It becomes clearly manifest that the following verse is literally applicable to this ancient book: “It is a noble Quran, In a hidden Book (kitab maknun), which none save the purified touch, a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds.” That is, the noble Quran is in a book, which is hidden. No one can apprehend it save that heart which has been purified. It has descended from the Sustainer of the worlds.

  Dara makes the bold move of identifying the Upanishads with the “hidden book” mentioned in the Quran. His interpretation sweeps aside traditional explications of the verse, which either identify the hidden book with the Preserved Tablet, that is, the archetype of God’s words inscribed upon a heavenly tablet, which has not been sent down to earth, or more generally with a celestial book.45 He further elaborates:

  It becomes clear and evident that this verse is not applicable to the Psalms, or the Torah, or the Gospel, and from the word for revelation (tanzil, literally sending down), it is manifest that [this book] does not apply to the Preserved Tablet. As the Upnikhat, which is a concealed secret (sirr), is the origin of this book, and the verses of the glorious Quran are found in it literally; thus the “hidden Book” [mentioned in the Quran] is this ancient book, through which the unknown has become known and the incomprehensible comprehensible to this faqir.46

  The prince finally has custody of the book, a collection of texts that have never before been translated. Dara Shukoh has moved beyond learning from sages and ascetics. He now has access to the very source of monotheism, the key to understanding all the celestial books. He who reads the Sirr-i akbar, Dara concludes, “having considered it the translation of the word of God, and having abandoned bigotry, becomes imperishable, fearless, without a care, and eternally liberated.”47

  Among all the sacred celestial texts, Dara explains, the oldest were a collection of four Vedas, which were revealed to the pure one (safi) of God, Adam, the first human and progenitor of all humanity. Early Islamic tradition had long associated Adam’s first terrestrial home with India.48 In Dara’s telling, Sanskrit thus represents the original, primal la
nguage of humanity, an idea that had important afterlives in the development of modern comparative philology. According to Dara, the Upanishads represented a distillation of the Vedas and contained the ancient secrets of mystical knowledge and pure, original monotheism.49

  Lodged between the Sirr-i akbar’s preface and the translated Upanishads is a glossary of about 114 Sanskrit terms, with their meanings in Persian. This list begins with one of its most striking equivalences, the syllable Om, which is interpreted as Allah. An explanatory note adds that it is the same as pranava, another word for Om, and means the “ender of secrets.” The Hindu deity Brahma is the same as the archangel Jibril, who transmitted the revelation to the Prophet Muhammad, Vishnu is the angel Mikail, and Mahesh the angel Israfil. Brahmaloka, the abode of the deity Brahma, is the “farthest lote tree” (sidrat-ul-muntaha), which is Jibril’s abode, referenced in the Quran. These equivalences function like a secret language that one has to master to understand the book—a symbolic code with which initiates could unlock the esoteric meanings of the text. The actual translations, though, tend to preserve both the Indic and the Persian terms side by side, instead of completely effacing one into the other.

  Sometimes, manuscripts of the Sirr-i akbar take an alternate title with a similar meaning: Sirr-ul-asrar, “Secret of all Secrets.” They share this other title with certain writings on mysticism as well as on a related tradition of esoteric knowledge.50 The Sirr-ul-asrar is a title, for instance, of a manual on the Sufi way by the founder of the Qadiri order, Abd-ul-Qadir Jilani (d. 1166). It also is the Arabic name for a famed treatise of occult lore and political philosophy, known in Latin as the Secretum secretorum, and long attributed to Aristotle. Both titles were well known in India.

  This occult collection purports to be an exchange of letters between Aristotle and Alexander. This work traveled from Arabic to Persian, Latin, and a host of European vernaculars. The Arabic text claims to have been translated from the original Greek on the orders of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun. The work is filled with counsel for princes, esoteric knowledge, spells, and a fascination with India drawn from the Alexander romance.51 Dara Shukoh would have also likely been familiar with the Mughal book of spells titled Zakhira-i Iskandar (The Treasury of Alexander) translated into Persian by the governor Muhammad Baqir Najm-i Sani. Like the Sirr-ul-asrar, this book of charms and talismans claims a royal pedigree. It was apparently discovered by the Abbasid caliph al-Mutasim, when he conquered the Byzantine city of Amorium in 838. Recall that Muhammad Baqir, who served as a high-ranking governor for both Jahangir and Shahjahan, also produced a Persian abridgment of Razi’s al-Sirr-ul-maktum (The Hidden Secret), a book of astral magic, filled with talismans and charms, that came to be well known in the Mughal court.52 These writings pay attention to the power of the soul or psyche (nafs) as a means of effecting occult or miraculous phenomenon. They also address how to harness the hidden forces of jinn and angels. At the Mughal court, the word sirr, or secret, in a title, thus had a long association with esoteric knowledge in the service of imperial power.

  The prominence of the secret, the imperial translation bureau, the authority of primordial, celestial books, even the fascination with India, are all legible in a language of esoteric learning familiar to many in Dara Shukoh’s world. But the secret also had palpable Indic connotations as well. The very meaning of the word “upanishad” in Sanskrit, after all, is “secret” as Dara is quick to tell us in his introduction, as in a hidden or esoteric doctrine. One major theme in Dara’s collection of Upanishads is cosmography and with it the attending interest in deities, demons, and heavenly structures. The Sanskrit word “upanishad” denotes the secret or esoteric connections uniting existence.53 By opening up and harnessing these celestial writings for the first time in Persian, Dara, as the heir apparent, the consummate philosopher-prince, lays claim to an ancient knowledge of how to master the world.

  Dara’s Sirr-i akbar includes eleven of the principal Upanishads associated with the early corpus of the four Vedas. He also incorporates several later Upanishads, including ten Yoga Upanishads that assimilate hatha yogic practices into Vedanta. He avoids those Upanishads that have a pronounced sectarian tilt—those describing the worship of deities, and the different kinds of sectarian markings for devotees, for instance. Most probably, the Sirr-i akbar is the end result of a process of winnowing and selection of texts best reflecting the monotheistic message that Dara saw in the Upanishads. It is unlikely that it reproduced in Persian a preexisting anthology of Upanishads.54 The Sirr-i akbar brings together an array of disparate, yet interconnected texts, and binds them into a sacred scripture.

  The Sirr-i akbar adroitly tackles a problem that often vexed translators of Hindu texts into Persian—the conundrum of multiple gods. These deities appear so frequently in several Upanishads selected here that it would be very difficult to ignore or delete them. The main strategy that the Sirr-i akbar uses is to sidestep their divinity and enfold them within an Islamic framework. So a god (deva) becomes either an angel (firishta) or a spiritual guardian (muwakkal), a term often used to refer to the jinn. Sometimes, the Sirr-i akbar identifies individual deities as specific angels, as we have seen in the Majma-ul-bahrain and its own glossary, but as mentioned earlier, it never uses these equivalences as substitutes for their actual names.

  For instance, the opening verse of the Mundaka Upanishad mentions that Brahma, who “arose as the first among gods” and is the world’s creator and guardian, instructed his firstborn son Atharvan in the knowledge of Brahman, the foundation of all knowledge.55 These two concepts—of Brahma, the creator and foremost god, and Brahman, the ultimate reality about which Brahma taught, do not quite equate to God and the knowledge of God, respectively. This would pose a problem for a Sufi who believed in the unity of all being. If Brahma is the same as the one God of the Quran and Islam, then how could he be distinct from Brahman, the ultimate reality? Besides, a Muslim translator would also be uneasy with the idea of Brahma having a son, because the Quran, pushing back against the Christian trinity, explicitly states that God does not beget progeny.

  The Sirr-i akbar’s version closely captures the sense of the Sanskrit verse, but alters its texture: “Before all the spiritual guardians (muwakkalan), first Brahma, that is the spiritual guardian of creation, became manifest. Thus Brahma, who is the earth’s cause and world’s possessor, that Brahma, spoke to his eldest son, whose name was Atharba, of Brahmabidya, that is the knowledge of God’s unity, which is the greatest of all the branches of knowledge, and which contains all the sciences.”56 By making Brahma a special category of being, separate from the one God, the Sirr-i akbar reshapes the text in a monotheistic mold. But, by assigning Brahma the divine power of creation, the Sirr-i akbar still keeps fairly close to the Sanskrit text, without offering a completely different retelling.

  The Sirr-i akbar’s translation style is digressive and laden with explanations. It frequently reads more like a commentary than a word-for-word translation of the Sanskrit material into Persian. Once, the text explicitly invokes the non-dualist philosopher Shankara, though it often draws upon his commentaries without mentioning his name.57 In many cases, Dara Shukoh uses Shankara’s commentaries to layer the Upanishads with non-dualist or esoteric interpretations, making these ancient Sanskrit texts accord more with the prince’s Sufi inclinations.

  One such passage occurs in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, forming part of a series of creation narratives. It recounts that Prajapati, the primordial “lord of creatures,” had two kinds of progeny: gods and demons, respectively: “Now, Prajapati’s offspring were of two kinds: gods and demons. Indeed, the gods were the younger of his offspring, while the demons were the older; and they were competing for these worlds. So the gods said to themselves: ‘Come, let us overcome the demons during a sacrifice by means of the High Chant.’ ”58

  The Sirr-i akbar as usual substitutes angels for gods, and jinn for demons. But, inspired by Shankara’s commentary, it understands the two cat
egories of Prajapati’s descendants as imbued with a deeper meaning. “Prajapat, what is meant by Prajapat here is this very person, his progeny are of two groups: angels and jinn. The external and internal senses, which are conjoined with possessing knowledge and acts in accordance with the Book of God, those are the angels. The senses, which are in agreement with one’s own sensual pleasures and the desires, which contravene the Book, are the jinn. Devta, meaning angel, in the lexicon is a person who is good in comparison with the rest, and asur in the lexicon is he who is [immersed] in his own desires and sensual pleasures.…”59 Following Shankara, the Sirr-i akbar makes a striking interpretive move. It maps these categories of gods / angels and demons / jinn onto the individual self. The implicit suggestion is that the individual self is identical to Prajapati.

  But Dara Shukoh also frequently relies on other unnamed glosses to merely explain things that would have been alien or puzzling to many Persian readers of the day. For instance, the Prashna Upanishad discusses how the primordial lord Prajapati was food, which gave rise to semen, from which were produced creatures. It then relates: “So, those who undertake the vow of Prajapati produce a couple / To them belong the world of Brahman.…”60

  The Sirr-i akbar does not so much translate these lines as discuss the finer points of the regulation of sexual relations for the householder: “A person, who, on this very night has intercourse with a woman / wife, and does not have intercourse during the day, does not waste his semen. From the intercourse that has occurred at night, from that semen a son or a daughter is born. A person who has intercourse with a wife at night will reach the world of the moon, which is a good world. A person who, from the fourth day, which is the period of purification after menstruation, until the sixteenth day, which are the days of attachment of the semen to the womb, approaches a woman one time in a month, this action falls within brahmacharj, the Sanskrit brahmacharya, that is, within devotion and ascetic practice, when he does not do this act for the sake of pleasure but rather does this, by the command of God (khuda) for the aim of fathering progeny.” These detailed rules draw on injunctions elucidated in Hindu legal texts regarding the appointed times for intercourse, which in turn are based on Indic medical notions regarding a woman’s fertile period every month.61 In passages like this one, the Sirr-i akbar displays a taxonomic mode of inquiry, through gathering and listing Indic concepts and practices. The details it provides would have been the outcome of Dara Shukoh’s discussion with his pandit collaborators.