Perso Indica

[Preliminary Entry] The Razm-nāma (Book of War) is a translation of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata into Persian that was sponsored by the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) in the 1580s. The translation includes all eighteen books of the Mahābhārata and the Harivaṃśa appendix. The translation is based primarily on the Devanagari version (northern recension) of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. However, the Aśvamedha Parvan (Horse Sacrifice Book) is based on the Jaiminīyāśvamedha, an alternative and starkly different Sanskrit retelling. The Harivaṃśa remains unprinted, and scholars have not yet determined its source text(s).

The project involved two teams of translators who transmitted the epic verbally via their shared language of Hindi. A colophon that appears as early as 1599 lists the Sanskrit interpreters (mu‘abbirān) as: Deva Miśra, Śatāvadhāna, Madhusūdana Miśra, Caturbhuja, and Shayḫ Bhāvan. Of these Brahman interpreters, the only clearly identifiable person is Shayḫ Bhavan, who converted Islam and appears several times in Persianate histories of the period. The Persianate translators (mutarjimān) include Naqīb Ḫān (a court historian), Mullā Shīrī (a poet), Sultan Thānīsarī (a fiscal administrator), and Badā’ūnī (a secretary and prolific translator). The initial translation took eighteen months, but the Persian text was likely polished for some time thereafter.

In 1587, Akbar commissioned his vizier, Abū al-Fażl ibn Mubārak, to compose a learned preface (“Muqaddama”) to the Razm-nāma that thereafter accompanied the text. Abū al-Fażl’s preface contains a list of reasons that prompted Akbar to initiate the translation, which is of notable historical value. Later readers often attributed the entire Razm-nāma to Abū al-Fażl, although we lack evidence that he was involved in the initial translation process.

The Razm-nāma was lavishly illustrated in both imperial and subimperial manuscript copies. The translation was also voraciously recopied and survives today in hundreds of manuscript copies across South Asia and Europe.

A. T.