A Sufi/Hindu/Sanskrit/Urdu Gita: Religion, Language, and the Stakes of Translation in Colonial-era South Asia”

The question of the relationship between religion and language, and that of translation between languages also often entailing a translation between religious traditions, is one that all scholars of South Asian religions have encountered. Specifically, the question of Hindu-Muslim translation, that is to say, translation between languages associated with the traditions of Islam, such as Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, and those associated with the traditions of Hinduism, such as Sanskrit and Hindi, among others, has been the site of groundbreaking scholarship in recent years. Scholarship by SherAli Tareen (Perilous Intimacies), Audrey Truschke (Culture of Encounters and The Language of History, Shankar Nair (Translating Wisdom), Aditya Behl (Love’s Subtle Magic), Ayesha Irani (The Muhammad Avatara), Carl Ernst (Refractions of Islam in India: Situating Sufism and Yoga), among others, has sought to push the field of religious studies past outdated models of “syncretism” and think about ways to better capture the diversity and flexibility of inter-religious interaction in South Asia. These scholars rightfully challenge us to re-think the idea of necessarily or inherent associations between religion and language, and point to the vast treasury of translation initiatives, especially in the Mughal period, as evidence of imaginative endeavors through which people understood themselves and their religious others in nuanced ways that, while of course not completely devoid of sectarian bias, were nonetheless largely foreclosed upon by the experience of colonial modernity and the hardening of the Hindi=Hindu and Urdu=Muslim fault lines in the early decades of the 20th century.

This paper seeks to build on existing scholarship on the relationships between religion, language, and translation in pre-modern South Asia by arguing against the idea that such modes of self-fashioning were lost with the advent of nationalist politics. How were Muslim and Hindu identities co-constituted in modern South Asia? How have they been imagined, and what possibilities remain for the future? How does translation specifically between the languages and literary traditions associated with Islam and Hinduism, and between the systems of thought and practice they encompass, play into this co-creation of self and other? And how might we think about translation itself as a method for better understanding the dynamics of inter-religious encounter and exchange in the academic study of religion?

These questions will be engaged through introducing an archive of Urdu-language translations of the Bhagavad Gita produced in the late 1880s through the mid-1940s, which have not yet received scholarly attention, and do much to trouble a narrative of historical rupture in terms of how the relationship between religion, literature, translation, and identity politics has been understood to date in South Asian studies. The authors of these Urdu Gitas are almost entirely Hindu. What was at stake in taking on such a translation project at the very historical moment when questions of its possibility were so deeply fraught, religiously and politically? What are the possibilities, and the limits, for Hindu authors (re)writing a Hindu scriptural text in what at the time was widely understood to be a Muslim language, and a language of political Islam at that? What happens when a text and the tradition associated with it is re-presented through the lens and language of the “other”? Drawing from translation theory and Tony Stewart’s work on Hindu-Muslim literary exchanges in Bengal, which calls for a shift away from focus on the final product of translation towards a greater understanding of  the process of its creation, this paper will both provide an overview of extant Urdu Gitas and pursue a close analysis of one process in particular - a 1935 translation by one Munshi Bisheshwar Prashad “Munawwar” Lakhnavi, a Hindu Urdu poet from Lucknow who renders the Gita as “Nasim-e Irfan,” and renders Arjuna’s dialogue with Krishna in the Sufi vocabulary of of gnosis and mystical knowledge of the divine.

Undertaking such a project at a high point of deteriorating inter-religious relations and exclusivist language politics in South Asia cannot but be understood as intervening in this broader field, and I will argue that, in part, the conditions of possibility for a project like Munawwar’s Nasim-e Irfan are always already working to undo it. The reality of the increasing calcification of Hindu-Muslim conflict that is the grounds out of which the translation emerges, and its insistence on a certain kind of commensurability between the traditions, also indexes the idea of their incommensurability at the same time. And yet the act of translation can acknowledge this and also hold out hope for deconstructing this binary even as the binary provides the starting point. In his new book Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire, SherAli Tareen observes that “translation, like friendship, is an invitation to inhabit…a form of unsettling displacement that renders impossible the return of the self as purely itself.” For these Urdu Gitas, this is the radical experiment in the moment of colonial modernity, using the very conditions that are thought to have precluded this kind of translational thinking, and undertaking a distancing of the self to the self through the language and imaginative theological framework of the other.