The literary oeuvre of Mustafa Khaliqdad ʿAbbasi

The most productive entry point into the textual corpus of retranslations in the Mughal period is the work of Mustafa Khaliqdad ʿAbbasi, who made a career of retranslation at the Mughal court between 1588 and 1611. While we know absolutely nothing about his life and background, he left three Persian retranslations—two from Sanskrit and one from Arabic—with lengthy prefaces in which he contemplates the craft of translation, the tasks before him, and the circumstances in which he produced his work. The first translation he completed, some time after 1588, was Panchakiyana or Panj Dastan (Five Stories), a translation of Pūrṇabhadra's twelfth-century Pañcākhyāna, which is a Jain rewriting of the famous Pañcatantra (Five Strategies). Soon after, during the 1590s, Khaliqdad completed a second translation entitled Darya-yi Asmar (Ocean of Nighttime Stories), a translation of Somadeva's eleventh-century Kathāsaritsāgara (Ocean of Story-Rivers). Lastly, in 1611, during Jahangir's reign, Khaliqdad was tasked with retranslating Muhammad al-Shahrastani's Arabic twelfth-century Kitab al-Nihal wa-l-Milal (The Book of Sects and Religions), entitled Tawzih al-Milal (Explanation of Religions) in Persian.

All three texts had been previously translated into Persian, either in South Asia or Iran. Kathāsaritsāgara was translated first into Persian in the fifteenth century at Zayn al-ʿAbidin's court in Kashmir, and did not come down to us. Kitab al-Nihal wa-l-Milal was translated from Arabic into Persian at Shahrukh's Timurid court in Isfahan in 1439.Footnote ¹⁷ The Pañcatantra—the famous collection of stories on political wisdom—has gained a life of its own in the Islamic world and come to be known as Kalila wa-Dimna: first translated into Pahlavi at the court of Anushirwan in the sixth century, it was later translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ at the Abbasid court in the eighth century, then partially into Persian by the poet Rudaki in the tenth century, retold again by Nasrallah Munshi in the twelfth century, and then again by Waʿiz Kashifi at the Timurid court in Herat in the early sixteenth century. The Pañcatantra was retold in Persian once more before Khaliqdad's version, by Akbar's vizier, Abu al-Fazl, at the Mughal court in 1588.Footnote ¹⁸

In what follows, I focus mainly on Khaliqdad's Panchakiyana. It is there—in the preface and body of the translation—where he contests the norms and ideals of Persian prose writing most forcefully and enunciates his approach to translation. Khaliqdad's work is a productive entry point to these questions, not only because he was such a prolific translator, but also because his Panchakiyana was an unsuccessful retranslation project. The fact that it survives in only one manuscript and was never even finished points to its reception.Footnote ¹⁹ In fact, Khaliqdad's comments in the preface reveal that the text was only a draft, intended to be later improved and embellished in collaboration with Akbar, his patron.Footnote ²⁰ This statement, together with the discrepancies between the text as we have it and the text as Khaliqdad envisioned it to be after the emperor's embellishment, suggest that Akbar was not impressed by the draft and discontinued the project. Moreover, Khaliqdad's name was completely forgotten and is not mentioned in any historical work or literary compendium from the time. His translation strategies do not seem to have influenced other authors at the time or in the years that followed. While there are some similarities between Khaliqdad's strategies and those of other authors who engaged in translation under Akbar, Khaliqdad's case makes it clear that what worked in genres such as historiography or expository mystical treatises could not work in wisdom literature. Other translations produced at Akbar's court in the 1580s and 1590s, which aimed to conform with their royal patron's literary preferences, were quite successful. Khaliqdad's translation strategies in his Panchakiyana, however, did not produce a piece of literature, but instead a strange translation that did not adhere to the requirements of belletristic writing. Persian belletristic writing (or adab, as explained in the penultimate section of this article) emphasizes not only appropriate social conduct and ethics, but also the elevated literary style in which these are formulated and offered to the educated reader. Persian belles lettres thus incorporates clever poetry—both original and canonical, harmonized prose, puns, diverse quotations from stories and anecdotes, and Arabic words and verses for referential and aesthetic purposes alike.

Khaliqdad's translation was unsuccessful, I argue, because his attempt to balance the literary conventions of Persian belletristic writing, his own convictions about translation ideals, and the literary expectations of his patron entailed trying to have his cake and eat it too. These mutually exclusive goals resulted in awkward prose, an odd mixture of registers that did not fulfil the standards of eloquent prose writing and advice literature. Thus, even though Khaliqdad was active during what is considered the heyday of Sanskrit-Persian encounters at the Mughal court, he was very much a stylistic outlier. Being unable to establish a new style of Persian prose writing, then, was a major part of Khaliqdad's unsuccessfulness. When considering how Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna and Nasrallah Munshi's Persian Kalila wa Dimna were considered as inaugurating a new style of prose writing in their respective languages, it becomes clear that Khaliqdad's task was more than simply translating any text. He was unable to live up to what the rich Kalila wa Dimna tradition required of him.

A Persian theory of translation in Khaliqdad's prefaces

Khaliqdad begins his preface by narrating how the Pañcatantra came to be known in the Islamicate world. He begins with the story of the first Pahlavi translation from the sixth century and moves on to mention all renditions of Kalila wa-Dimna composed in the following millennium, up until his time.Footnote ²¹ Much like his predecessors in the Kalila wa-Dimna tradition, Khaliqdad points out the problems he identifies in previous renditions, which justify a new translation. Such comments can be found in the three most famous Persian renditions of the text by Nasrallah Munshi, Waʿiz Kashifi, and Abu al-Fazl. Munshi, for example, in his twelfth-century Persian Kalila wa Dimna, explained in his preface:

If Munshi's problem with existing renditions was that they were more interested in the embedded stories than the book's teachings, and therefore rendered it in an incomplete manner, Kashifi, in his early sixteenth-century Anwar-i Suhayli, raises a different issue with Munshi's text: the style.

Abu al-Fazl points the exact same criticism at Kashifi in the introduction to ʿIyar-i Danish. Abu al-Fazl mentions Akbar's request that he rewrite Kashifi's Anwar-i Suhayli and, with respect to Kashifi's style and language, says:

Yet, even with these presumed stylistic problems, all three texts—Kalila wa Dimna, Anwar-i Suhayli, and ʿIyar-i Danish—were considered among the best examples of Persian belles lettres for centuries. Censuring earlier renditions of Kalila wa Dimna in prefaces by later authors was thus a norm in itself, and served as the primary reason for undertaking the book's rewriting, even if earlier renditions already observed the dominant literary norms of Persian belles lettres. Footnote ²⁵

Khaliqdad thus continues the tradition of addressing issues with previous renditions, discussing two kinds of problems in the existing textual tradition of Kalila wa-Dimna. The first set of problems can be defined as related to style. Khaliqdad argues that a new translation is needed because earlier renditions are convoluted and do not impart the meaning of the text clearly enough. The culprits are ornate language in the style of secretaries and the excessive use of Arabic. This view is shared across his translations. In his preface to Darya-yi Asmar, he unequivocally condemns ornate language, arguing: “The writer must […] forsake completely the use of rhetoric, as its metaphors veil the face of meaning, or distract the already stretched out mind of the listener from the apprehension of meaning.”Footnote ²⁶ In Tawzih al-Milal, he also criticizes the style of secretaries:

The whole purpose of writing a foreign book in Persian, Khaliqdad writes in all three prefaces, “should not be anything but making its meanings easier to understand for Persian-knowing people.”Footnote ²⁸ According to him, rhetorical figures and poetic language do a disservice to this purpose. Ornate language is a barrier to comprehension and should be avoided entirely in translations. In Ṭawzih al-Milal, he elaborates further:

Khaliqdad's emphasis on clarity of meaning is repeated in every preface, regardless of the fact that his three translations do not belong to the same genre. Ornate speech should not be part of the practice of translation.Footnote ³⁰

Another impediment to clarity of meaning in earlier translations, according to Khaliqdad, is the presence of many Arabic words, expressions, and verses. In Panchakiyana, Khaliqdad writes that even though Nasrallah Munshi's version is “the touchstone for Persian-knowers in terms of depth, freshness of expression, and simplicity,” it still has many Arabic verses and words that are difficult to understand.Footnote ³¹ While Waʿiz Kashifi saw his own rewriting of Munshi's text as a Persianization project that cleared the text of its excessive use of Arabic and uncommon words and expressions, Khaliqdad mentions in his preface that Akbar also did not approve of Kashifi's Anwar-i Suhayli, as it was still “not free of Arabic rhetoric and words that are hard to understand.”Footnote ³²

In Darya-yi Asmar, Khaliqdad makes an interesting comment about the admixture of Arabic and Persian, attributing this practice to an author's lack of knowledge in Persian. One of the things that obstruct meaning, Khaliqdad writes, is when “some of those who have partial knowledge, by mixing Arabic and Persian together […], organize it [i.e., a discourse] in disarray, and by abusing the inkstand and the pen, they sinfully turn the innocence of the white page to black.”Footnote ³³ He then continues: “the writer must refrain from tempering with the discourse by mixing in it another language in a way that causes obstruction and difficulty in understanding the content.”Footnote ³⁴ The admixture of Arabic and Persian is, to him, the main culprit for the lack of success of the previous Kathāsaritsāgara Persian translation, which was prepared in Zayn al-ʿAbidin's court in Kashmir in the first half of the fifteenth century:

These are somewhat odd statements, as Persian authors did not mix Arabic and Persian due to their lack of knowledge of Persian prose. In fact, the situation was quite the contrary: incorporating Arabic in Persian literature was a matter of aesthetics and literary style. Julia Rubanovich argues that, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, two developments in Persian literary culture influenced the shaping of the prose repertoire. The first was “the increasing tendency towards ‘poeticalness’ of prose,” and the second was “the establishing of the literary aesthetic (versus referential) function of Arabic in prose texts written in Persian.”Footnote ³⁶ The two processes, I would add, are closely interconnected. Arabic's grammatical and morphological characteristics, alongside its system of noun derivation, are among the things that enable, for example, the writing of rhymed prose (sajʿ) in Persian or the employment of other common practices in prose-writing, such as ishtiqāq and tajnīs (the use of different derivatives of the same root and the use of similar sounding words, respectively).

It is hard to imagine that an author working at a Persianate court after the twelfth century would lack knowledge of Persian. A lack, so to speak, especially in those formative decades in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when New Persian gained more ground, might be attributed to the language itself rather than its users.Footnote ³⁷

Thus, the mere presence of Arabic vocabulary in Persian texts does not tell us much about an author's skill or competence in either language. Further questions should be asked to determine the function of Arabic vocabulary in each text: when and where were they written? What is their genre? What are the Arabic words in these texts, and in which context do they appear? Only then will we be able to say something meaningful about an author's linguistic usage. Authors such as Nasrallah Munshi or Waʿiz Kashifi, for example, who produced Persian prose renditions of Kalila wa Dimna before Khaliqdad's time, were clearly using Arabic for aesthetic purposes, not out of lexical necessity.

This is made clear when comparing Kashifi's Anwar-i Suhayli with Abu al-Fazl's ʿIyar-i Danish (1588), a Mughal rewriting of Kashifi's work commissioned by Akbar. Abu al-Fazl, like Khaliqdad, writes in his preface that, according to Akbar, “even though Anwar-i Suhayli, in comparison with Kalila wa Dimna, is famous for its contemporary language, it is still not free of Arabic rhetoric and Persian figurative speech.”Footnote ³⁸ Abu al-Fazl, therefore, was entrusted with the task of rewriting Kashifi's Anwar-i Suhayl. Abu al-Fazl thus purges Anwar-i Suhayli of Arabic verses and expressions, simplifying the syntax while sporadically leaving some of the descriptions and ornamentation. To illustrate this point, a comparative reading of a short section is sufficient. Below is a translation of the opening lines of the famous story of two ducks and a tortoise, as told by Kashifi in his Anwar-i Suhayli.

In Abu al-Fazl's ʿIyar-i Danish, the same section is briefly told as follows:

As is readily apparent, Abu al-Fazl strips the narrative of rhetorical devices and ornamentation, such as inserted verses (either in Persian or in Arabic), internal rhyming, descriptions, analogies, and metaphors. For example, out of the fifteen inserted verses in the Anwar-i Suhayli's telling of the story—either hemistiches (miṣraʿ), full verses (bayt), or poems (shiʿr)—Abu al-Fazl keeps only one hemistich in his rewriting.

But if Abu al-Fazl rewrote Anwar-i Suhayli in 1588 and followed Akbar's wishes to simplify the text and purge it of Arabic, why was Khaliqdad asked to produce another version so quickly after? Khaliqdad's text, we learn from his preface, was an entirely different project a project only made possible after Abu al-Fazl had finished his rewriting. As Khaliqdad explains: “When the original Indian version appeared in the grand library, it entered the alchemical sight of His Majesty the Divine Caliph.”Footnote ⁴¹ Khaliqdad's project, therefore, was not a rewriting of Kalila wa Dimna, but a new Persian translation of the Sanskrit source.

The nature of this project explains Khaliqdad's critical position vis-à-vis the entire tradition of Kalila wa Dimna. While previous renditions of the text were replete with Arabic and too ornate for his and his patron's taste, the main problem, as Khaliqdad saw it, related to issues of textual criticism and faithfulness. As he writes: “This book has been translated from one language into another numerous times and rendered from one mode of expression to another, and so obviously changes and modifications occurred in it and elisions and additions took place.”Footnote ⁴² Since the first Pahlavi translation in the sixth century, Khaliqdad reminds the reader, not one Kalila wa Dimna rewriting had relied on the Sanskrit source. In Khaliqdad's eyes, this was a problem, as translations should be both clear and faithful to the source text. The best way to rectify these problems of style and faithfulness, per Khaliqdad, was to return to the source and translate the Pañcatantra afresh. Khaliqdad thus uses the preface to introduce himself as the first translator in a thousand years to closely read the Sanskrit source for his translation.Footnote ⁴³

Khaliqdad's statement regarding the “original Indian version” compels us to ask: which text was Khaliqdad translating? The text's modern editors mention in their introduction that the original Sanskrit manuscript from which Khaliqdad was translating does not exist today. However, they identify the recension that Khaliqdad translated as the Pañcākhyāna, a twelfth-century recension of the Pañcatantra, written by a Jain monk named Pūrṇabhadra.Footnote ⁴⁴ Given the strong ties between Jains and the Mughal court during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it should be no surprise that this was the recension that found its way to the Mughal imperial library. It is known from Jain sources, for example, that after the death of the Jain monk Padmasundara in Akbar's court in 1569, Akbar held onto the deceased's manuscript collection for about a decade, until he gifted it to another Jain monk at the court, Hīravijaya, in 1583.Footnote ⁴⁵ As the analysis in the final part of this article shows, Khaliqdad read Pūrṇabhadra's Pañcākhyāna closely and carefully, and took every measure to make this fact known through his translation.

Khaliqdad's emphasis on returning to the sources raises questions around his criteria for authenticity and how the Mughals perceived the Sanskrit language and literature. The text he ended up translating was, after all, a late recension of the Pañcatantra, although he does not acknowledge this fact. Whether Khaliqdad was unaware of the text's various recensions in Sanskrit or simply disregarded its textual history, the fact that the question of sources or manuscripts never comes up in the context of his translations from Sanskrit might suggest that working directly with a Sanskrit text was enough for him to determine that this is the true source, or at least a reliable one. This is particularly striking when compared with Khaliqdad's prefatory comments on his translation from Arabic. When explaining why a new translation of Shahrastani's Kitab al-Nihal wa-l-Milal was needed, Khaliqdad argues that manuscripts of the earlier Timurid translation were useless, as

In other words, not only are various manuscripts of the first Persian translation faulty due to scribal errors, but the translation itself is also not faithful to the Arabic source because it was based on only one copy, which probably had errors of its own. This passage reveals Khaliqdad's double standard with respect to the authenticity or trustworthiness of Arabic and Sanskrit sources: his comments on the issues in existing Persian and Arabic manuscripts suggest that, for him, simply returning to some Arabic source was not enough. Khaliqdad deemed it necessary to examine his sources more critically and trace their textual lineage, while also considering the human agents that participated in their production. Sanskrit texts, however, were almost ahistorical to him. Working on Sanskrit sources while disregarding their textual history satisfied his search for origins.Footnote ⁴⁷

Did Khaliqdad really know Sanskrit?

Other Mughal translations from the late sixteenth century show that most translators did not have direct access to the Sanskrit sources. The Persian translations of the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha from the 1580s and 1590s, for example, were all produced by a group of Persian translators who relied on Sanskrit informants to mediate the Sanskrit texts in Hindavi. These informants were usually mentioned by name in prefaces or colophons. Khaliqdad, however, does not mention anyone. Is this enough for us to determine that Khaliqdad was indeed working by himself? While this omission alone does not prove anything, combined with the multilayered analogy Khaliqdad draws between himself and Burzoya—the sixth-century translator of the Pañcatantra from Sanskrit to Pahlavi—throughout his preface, it is clear Khaliqdad is trying to convince his readers that he was the only translator with a unique knowledge of Sanskrit.

Khaliqdad begins his survey of Kalila wa Dimna's textual history with Burzoya's translation, greatly elaborating on that story compared to the description he dedicates to later renditions. Moreoever, Khaliqdad's account of Burzoya's tale differs somewhat from the story in most Arabic and Persian manuscripts. The most common version tells of the Persian king Anushirwan, who heard of a book in India called Kalila wa Dimna that contained everything a king should know. The king thus sent a person named Burzoya to India to bring that book back to Persia. Burzoya reached the court of the Indian king, but did not tell anyone of his plan. Since the book was a secret possession of the Indian king, his most prized treasure, Burzoya could not gain access to it. Eventually, a friend at the court obtained the precious book from the royal library for Burzoya, who copied and translated it into Pahlavi and quickly returned to Persia. As a reward for his efforts, Burzoya asked the Persian king that the story of his life and journey to India be written. This task was entrusted to Buzurjmihr, the king's minister, who wrote a chapter about Burzoya.Footnote ⁴⁸

Khaliqdad goes into great detail in narrating the story of Burzoya, stressing the importance of Burzoya's task and the uniqueness of his linguistic skills. However, Khaliqdad's account omits several details and emphasizes others, highlighting certain aspects of the story to make the analogy between the two most flattering for Khaliqdad and his patron.

The first piece of information Khaliqdad provides about Burzoya is that the latter was chosen by Anushirwan due to his particular skill in both Persian and Hindavi, i.e., Sanskrit.Footnote ⁴⁹ Second, in closing his narrative about Burzoya, Khaliqdad mentions that Anushirwan kept the translation as part of the literary canon on kingship, and it remained there until the end of the rule of Yazdjird, the last king of ʿAjam.Footnote ⁵⁰ By mentioning the centrality of Burzoya's translation in the libraries of the kings of ʿAjam, it seems Khaliqdad was attempting to speak to Akbar's desire to claim a long-lasting civilizational connection between India and pre-Islamic Persia, thus situating Mughal India as the true heir of ancient Persian civilization. This desire was expressed by Akbar himself, as we know from the preface to Farhang-i Jahangiri (1608), a Persian dictionary composed by Hasan Jamal al-Din Husayn Inju and commissioned by Akbar. According to the dictionary's author, Akbar blamed the Arabs and the Arab conquest of ʿAjam for the decline of Pahlavi and fashioned himself as recovering the lost cultural heritage of ʿAjam.Footnote ⁵¹ The recovery process comprised philological projects of writing dictionaries and Sanskrit-Persian translations that were motivated, in part, by Mughal interest in pre-Islamic culture.Footnote ⁵²

The reference to ʿAjam, together with the analogy between Khaliqdad and Burzoya, allowed the former to draw another analogy, between his own patron, Akbar, and Burzoya's patron, Anushirwan. Such analogies are commonly found in Persian texts, with Anushirwan used as the model for a wise and just king. Here, however, I would suggest that Anushirwan's figure is invoked not only for his great wisdom, but also for his patronage of Pahlavi literature and translations of Indian texts. Thus, Khaliqdad's portrayal of his patron as Anushirwan, the wise king, the great patron of Pahlavi literature, further substantiates the Mughal fashioning of themselves as heirs of the ancient Persian civilization.Footnote ⁵³

Finally, Khaliqdad conveniently omits the fact that Burzoya was forbidden from reading the book and had to copy and translate it in secret, without the cooperation of the Indian court. This omission is necessary to making the analogy between Khaliqdad and Burzoya, as the circumstances of Khaliqdad's translation were not as politically challenging. Unlike Burzoya, Khaliqdad was both a member of the Mughal court and one of the few who worked closely with the emperor on translating Sanskrit texts. Khaliqdad had no trouble accessing the imperial library. In fact, he was specifically asked by the Indian ruler himself, i.e., Akbar, to render this precious book in Persian.

The analogy between Khaliqdad and Burzoya is brought home in the last paragraph of the preface, where the author explains how he was tasked with retranslating the Pañcatantra:

Khaliqdad's rhetoric here, presenting himself as modest and unworthy, is meant to state the exact opposite: it allows Khaliqdad to boast and, in fact, present himself as the best among the “thousand Burzoyas” at the court. In this way, Khaliqdad's detailed account of Burzoya's first translation, and the glorious light in which it is portrayed, serves as a model for Khaliqdad to imitate and to which he would like to be compared. The direct line he draws between Burzoya and himself emphasizes his authority and skills, as well as the special circumstances of the two: all the translators mentioned, who produced versions of Kalila wa Dimna during the millennium separating Burzoya and himself, did not work in India, had no direct access (physically and linguistically) to the Sanskrit source, and did not rely on the “original text” in their work.

Khaliqdad's preface to Panchakiyana, read together with sections of his prefaces to Darya-yi Asmar and Tawzih al-Milal, contains a consistent discourse on translation. Khaliqdad is not concerned solely with questions of style and literary taste, but also the translator's obligation to the source text and duty to convey it faithfully and accurately. Khaliqdad's strong emphasis on faithfulness to the source text, combined with his criticism of ornate prose in translation, is what made his translation different from earlier Kalila wa Dimna renditions on the one hand, and rendered his project a failure on the other. The following section carefully analyzes Khaliqdad's translation practices through a close reading of sections from the Panchakiyana to determine whether Khaliqdad indeed followed his prefatory statements and explore how he tackled challenges along the way.

Juggling between contradicting literary commitments

Khaliqdad's task seems, at first, straightforward. As he writes in Panchakiyana, “I wrote this rough draft, translating word for word and using simple, conversational Persian, without observing the norms of ornate speech.”Footnote ⁵⁵ He makes similar comments in his other translations, emphasizing his use of simple, conversational, easy-to-understand Persian, but the reader quickly learns that translating faithfully does not exclude additions to the final text. We also learn that Khaliqdad did not in fact have the final say in his translations. Akbar, Khaliqdad's patron, was actively involved in their production. In the preface to Darya-yi Asmar, the author briefly notes that “the patron also signed off on that style and arrangement.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In Panchakiyana, Khaliqdad elaborates further on Akbar's contribution: “When it [i.e., the translation] arrives at the noble ears of his majesty, it shall receive the glory of correction, as he'll be in charge of reductions and additions, the arrangement of remembrances, adding other chapters, dicta, proverbs, stories, rare poems, etc.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, we learn that Akbar was directly involved in these projects and acted as an arbiter of taste with respect to the stylistic and aesthetic aspects of the final work.Footnote ⁵⁸ This excerpt sheds light on the division of labor between translator and patron and reveals the gap between the text as we know it and what it was meant to be, had it been completed. Apart from the occasional inserted verse (explored below), the one surviving manuscript of the Panchakiyana does not include any of these “remembrances, other chapters, dicta, proverbs, stories, rare poems, etc.”

What kind of text is produced by translating faithfully into plain, conversational Persian? For Khaliqdad, it seems that faithful translation meant making the source text as present as possible in the translation, constantly proving to his readers—even those who could not read the original Sanskrit for comparison—that he was indeed working closely with Sanskrit sources. In this sense, Khaliqdad foreignized his text to a great extent; only an interlinear translation would be more foreignized.Footnote ⁵⁹

Including Sanskrit words in Persian transliteration was a common practice in many Mughal-era translations. As such, Khaliqdad also followed this practice, retaining all “untranslatable,” i.e., too culturally specific, words and providing a brief gloss immediately after. For example, words such as kṣatriya, purohita, and gandharva vivāha are transliterated in Persian script as chhatrī, purohit, and gandharb biyāh, with the added glosses usually give giving cultural context. Thus, rikhīshars (ṛṣīśvaras in Sanskrit) are explained as “worshippers who are the saints in the brahmins’ religion.”Footnote ⁶⁰ When explaining the difference between a kṣatriya king and a vaiśya weaver, Khaliqdad transliterates these words and explains: “he [i.e., the king] is of a great tribe and his lineage is very elevated, while you [i.e., the weaver] are of a lowly tribe and your lineage is base.”Footnote ⁶¹

However, Khaliqdad also goes further in foreignizing the source text, as he attempts to conserve the formal aspects of the original Sanskrit prosimetrum. To indicate that the original Sanskrit text was prosimetric, for example, Khaliqdad distinguishes between narrative sections originally composed in prose and the proverbs and dicta originally expressed in verse. He does not attempt to re-versify the Sanskrit verses according to Persian prosody, however, instead marking these parts as ishlok (Skt. śloka) and translating their contents literally.Footnote ⁶² For example, the Sanskrit verse “While being alone, roaming the forest/ Without any royal signs or knowledge of statecraft/ Because the lion is naturally powerful/ They all worship him as king” is translated by Khaliqdad impressively accurately as follows:

Often, after translating a verse literally, Khaliqdad adds a paraphrastic explanation of the proverb to further elucidate its meaning. For example, he offers the following translation of a proverb comparing the vile nature of an easy-to-please dog to the superior elephant, who is not as inclined to please its human caretaker:

Following the literal translation, Khaliqdad provides an explanation:

Khaliqdad's added explanations are mostly paraphrastic and do not draw upon discourses external to the text. Even when diverging from the original Sanskrit and inserting glosses and clarifications, the author remains close to the text at hand. Similar to conventional commentarial writing in the form of ḥāshiya (marginalia), Khaliqdad's comments are explanatory in nature and do not offer much insight into the meanings, interpretive controversies, or application of the text. Formally, however, the author's intervention is not styled as marginalia. His explanations are inserted in the body of the text as running commentary, albeit somewhat inconsistently. Not every Sanskrit verse is followed by a paraphrastic explanation, and the logic guiding Khaliqdad's choice of which verse to comment on is not readily apparent.

On occasion, the author analyzes the rhetorical figures used to make puns in the Sanskrit verse to demonstrate his intimate knowledge of Sanskrit literature. For example, in a section discussing the relationship between a king and his subjects, Khaliqdad translates a Sanskrit verse in such a way that one could almost hear the original Sanskrit compounds making the pun: “A king, who is like a lamp, skillfully draws wealth, that is like oil, from his subjects, without anyone noticing; like a lamp that draws up the oil through the wick, and no one notices that.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Following this literal translation, Khaliqdad explains what is lost in the translation:

In addition to exemplifying Khaliqdad's familiarity with Sanskrit, this passage sheds further light on the author's philological training. His clarification of the correct pronunciation of the Sanskrit word guṇa, using Perso-Arabic grammatical terminology, suggests his familiarity with the range of Persian philological enterprises characterizing the early modern Persianate world, most notably South Asia. This kind of clarifying comment, itself based on earlier Arabic commentarial practices, echoes terminology from early modern Persian dictionaries and Persian commentarial writing on poetry. In another place, Khaliqdad adds a brief clarification regarding the meaning and pronunciation of the word palwal: “Palwal, on the pattern of ḥanẓal, with a Persian bā and two lāms in the middle. It is a bitter medicine unique to India that makes one vomit.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Here, Khaliqdad maps a word from an Indian language into Perso-Arabic grammar. The Arabic word ḥanẓal, the pattern of which Khaliqdad compares to the word palwal, also serves as a gloss, as it is the name of a bitter fruit used for medicinal purposes.Footnote ⁶⁹ Perso-Arabic grammatical discourse and conventions of commentarial writing, then, are the main discourses on which Khaliqdad draws to keep his translation as close to the original Sanskrit as possible, while also clarifying what requires clarification.Footnote ⁷⁰

Khaliqdad diverges from the original Sanskrit in another major way, by inserting verses from the Persian canon throughout his text. Prosimetrum is so strongly identified with the literary traditions of Pañcatantra and Kalila wa Dimna that it would have been surprising not to find inserted verses in his translation, despite the author's professed goal of avoiding ornate prose and remaining as faithful to the source text as possible. This is because the function of verses in this tradition of wisdom literature is not merely ornamental. Not only is poetry considered the founding form of both Arabic and Persian literature, to which all other forms are poor relations, it would be wrong, as Julie Meisami argues, to give primacy to prose “frame” narratives over inserted lyric verses.Footnote ⁷¹

In the Sanskrit tradition, the versified proverbs and maxims in the various Pañcatantra recensions cannot be definitively attributed to an author or even to a text, as many were borrowed from existing Sanskrit literature—such as the epics or Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra—but their origins are also unknown. These subhāṣitas (“well-spoken” sayings or counsels) were likely borrowed from “the floating mass of oral tradition.”Footnote ⁷² The structure of Pañcatantra recensions also supports Meisami's rejection of the primacy of “frame” narratives. Most stories in the text begin with a verse relevant to the situation at hand. Upon another character's request to explain the saying, the first speaker then responds with a story, elucidating and exemplifying the lesson to be learned from the proverb.Footnote ⁷³ Rather than decorating a prose narrative, then, the verses in fact frame prose narratives that act as examples or explanations of the versified subhāṣitas.

In the Persian tradition, inserted verses in works of adab also often precede, at least temporally if not in terms of authority, the prose narratives. Adab denotes both the appropriate social conduct, its ethics and practices, as well as the literature that gathers proverbs, poetry, and parables dedicated to these issues, preserving their wisdom and edifying literati and nobility through them.Footnote ⁷⁴ The term adab, then, encompasses both the what and the how: the contents as well as how it is gathered, styled, and composed. The contents could be gathered from a range of sources, such as pre-Islamic poetry and collections of sayings, the Quran, verses from the great masters of Persian poetry, historiography, and more. The knowledge and skills required for styling, quoting, compiling, and composing could be found in treatises on literary criticism and literary manuals. These texts make it clear that adab was understood to comprise a range of philological sciences (ʿulūm), and the practitioner of adab, or adīb, should master them all: memorization of the lexicon, memorization of grammatical inflections and the rules of prosody, composition of prose and verse, calligraphy, and the art of quotation.Footnote ⁷⁵ The practice of verse insertion is not only a matter of selection and combination, as such, but instead establishes the author/compiler as the final authority of the work, higher even than the authority of the material they used, even if the author quotes from highly esteemed works to confer their own text with greater authority. Each verse is separate and discrete, detached from context, without an overarching frame, but are all unified by their compiler's voice and masterful ways of inserting quotes in appropriate places.Footnote ⁷⁶

Khaliqdad, thusly, not only aimed to represent the original prosimetric structure of the Sanskrit text, but also recreated the form by drawing from the Persian canon. His text, however, is not overflowing with verses like the works of his predecessors in the Kalila wa Dimna tradition. There is a total of twenty-three verse insertions throughout the text, varying in length from one hemistich to twenty-one consecutive verses. Eighteen verses appear in the first book, which is also the longest in both Persian and the original Sanskrit. In only six out of the twenty-three cases does Khaliqdad provide the name of the poet from whom he quotes. Saʿdi is the most quoted poet, with a total of seven quotes. Next in line is Hafiz with five quotes. Jami, Anwari, ʿIraqi, Amīr Khusraw, and Nasrallah Munshi are each quoted once. There are six verses whose origins I could not identify.

Khaliqdad's inserted verses function in two ways: they explain and entertain. In some cases, when the laconic phrasing of a translated śloka does not convey the point clearly enough in Persian, Khaliqdad attaches a Persian verse quoted from the canon, which expresses the same idea, to further clarify the lesson to be learned. For example, in one of the very first stories, Khaliqdad translates a verse literally, paraphrastically explains it in his own words, and finally quotes a verse from Saʿdi's Gulistan that encapsulates the same lesson as the original Sanskrit.

In some cases, a well-known Persian verse repeats the same meaning so neatly that Khaliqdad is almost compelled to insert it to point out the similarities between Sanskrit and Persian wisdom literature, confer greater authority on his translation, and please connoisseurs of Persian poetry. For example, following his translation of the Sanskrit śloka “A friend is one who helps out at difficult and painful times, even if that person is of another family. However, in days of ease and prosperity, everyone is a friend,” Khaliqdad is reminded of a two-verse sequence from Saʿdi's Gulistan, which expresses the very same wisdom.Footnote ⁷⁸

These verses are not offered as an explanation. Explanatory verses are usually preceded by common phrases such as “the intention is that” (murād ān ast ki) or “that is to say” (yaʿnī). Rather, when Khaliqdad appeals to his readers’ literary taste and familiarity with the canon, he uses phrases such as “on this topic, too” (ham darīn bāb) or “on this meaning, too” (ham darīn maʿnī) before quoting verses from the great masters of Persian literature.

Khaliqdad quotes verses not only from works of adab—such as Saʿdi's Gulistan—but also from lyric poetry. Sometimes, inserted verses do not express the Sanskrit lesson in such similar terms as we have seen above. For example, as an explanation for the Sanskrit śloka “a wise man cannot stay even one minute in a place where they don't know left from right,”Footnote ⁸⁰ Khaliqdad offers a verse quoted from Hafiz.

The clearest example of inserted verses meant to please and entertain the reader is also the longest sequence of verses Khaliqdad quotes. While most of his insertions consist of one to two verses in a row, this passage contains twenty-one verses, and poetically retells the entire story Khaliqdad had just translated from Sanskrit. This is the famous story of the tortoise and the two ducks, also mentioned above. Khaliqdad gives a long credit to Jami, the poet from whom he quotes, and repeats the entire narrative in Jami's words.Footnote ⁸² For the sake of brevity, I do not include a translation of the entire versified narrative here, but only the closing lines in which Jami concludes the moral of the story:

Jami's versified narrative does not add much nuance or clarity to the story as it is told in prose; it simply offers the same narrative in a neatly wrapped, nicer package. Not only that, but the verses are also quoted from one of the Persian poets most beloved by the Mughals: Jami's popularity among Mughal elites was closely related to the “Mughal revival of Herat” as their direct source of illustrious cultural inheritance.Footnote ⁸⁴ Inserting the entire famous story in its versified form, then, seems to have been considered appealing to Mughal literary connoisseurs.

Sometimes, Khaliqdad plants quoted verses as part of the narrative, not metatextually in his own voice as a narrator. Quoted from love poems by poets such as Hafiz or ʿIraqi, Khaliqdad uses these poetry lines to advance the narrative, as he puts them in the mouths of various characters. One beloved, for example, recites a line from Hafiz when meeting her lover:

Having characters speak the words of Hafiz and other poets in these amusing, irreverent, and sometimes violent stories, Khaliqdad must have aimed for a surprising, even comic effect. This is, of course, in addition to him demonstrating his familiarity with the Persian canon and his ability to quote from it cleverly.

Translation, literariness, and literalness at Akbar's court

This article has suggested that studying failed or unfinished translations can teach us a great deal about textual practices, literary taste, and how these may change over time, arguing that failed retranslations are where literary traditions and translation norms are most clearly negotiated and contested. Studying the work of Mustafa Khaliqdad ʿAbbasi, specifically his Panchakiyana, this article showed his unique approach to translation. The analysis offered here unpacked his layered approach to textual transposition, consisting of literal translation, paraphrastic explanations, and creative quotation from the Persian canon. In my reading, Khaliqdad emerges as a gifted Sanskritist, a careful philologist, and an educated man of letters.

It was Khaliqdad's endeavor to reconcile his commitment to the source text with his commitment to the genre and practices of adab literature, while at the same time striving to please his patron, that eventually rendered his project unsuccessful. Khaliqdad was trying to hold both ends of the spectrum between foreignization and domestication: extreme literalness in translation and unwavering commitment to a faithful representation of the source text on the one hand, and paying homage to the Islamicate tradition of Kalila wa Dimna in embracing many of its conventions on the other.

The analysis above reveals why Khaliqdad's Panchakiyana did not receive acclaim at the time: while his control over Sanskrit is impressive, his linguistic knowledge and meticulous philological approach to translation did not seem to have impressed the literary circles at the Mughal court. His verse insertions were not enough to cover the fact that his literal translations, accompanied by long paraphrastic comments, produced repetitive prose without flow. This combination resulted in an odd mixture of registers that did not fulfil the standards of eloquent prose writing and advice literature.

Akbar's literary preferences, notably his distaste for Arabic and ornate prose that heavily relied on Arabic grammatical inflections, were undoubtedly a major factor in how Khaliqdad composed his book. But Akbar's literary taste, albeit reflected in other contemporaneous Persian translations, cannot be seen as representative of broader Persian literary trends. Akbar's explicit request that his translators limit their use of Arabic and avoid ornate speech was not a culmination of shifts in style and literary standards in the broader Persianate world, did not have a lingering effect on later productions of Persian translations, and did not succeed in setting new standards for Persian literary production more broadly.

Although Akbar's involvement in his translators’ work was formative, he cannot be blamed for Khaliqdad's lack of success. Other translations produced at Akbar's court, which strove to speak to their royal patron's literary preferences, proved to be quite successful at the time and in the years that followed. Khaliqdad's failure is to be found in his attempt to reconcile innovative translation strategies with traditional literary expectations and genre requirements. What might have been acceptable in other genres, such as historiography or expository mystical treatises, was unacceptable in wisdom literature.

Khaliqdad's approach to translation did not have immediate effects on translation norms and strategies. It might, however, be seen as a very early precursor to the later professionalization of translation practices among munshis during the colonial period. While it may not be easy to draw a direct line from Khaliqdad at the end of the sixteenth century to munshis translating into Persian in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Khaliqdad's discourse on and strategies of translation suggest that what we now call proper or faithful translation was not introduced to South Asia, as commonly believed, in the colonial period. Khaliqdad's insistence on origins and sources, as well as his commitment to literalism and plain language, show that these issues of faithfulness, searches for Ur-texts, and accuracy already concerned Akbar's milieu in the 1590s.