Читать книгу The Rise of Wisdom Moon - Krishna mishra - Страница 48

introduction

ers as well.28 In Hindi and Braj, in particular, numerous versions are known. Most of these seem to have stemmed from the Vaishnava bhakti movements that proliferated in late medieval North India, whose devotees were attracted to the play owing to its generalized Vaishnava orientation, as we have discussed above. One such version, by GulAb SiNgh (1905), versifies the entire text in Braj, following prosodic conventions dear to the Braj bhakti poets.

Perhaps the most remarkable of the Indian translations of “The Rise of Wisdom Moon,” however, was one that carried it beyond the Hindu fold. This was the Persian version that emerged from the circle of Prince Dara Shikoh (1613–59), the Emperor Akbar’s ill-fated grandson, who, developing the implications of his forefather’s syncretic imperial religion, sought a reconciliation between Hinduism and Islam. The translation was achieved by the prince’s secretary and protege Banwalidas Wali, also known as Baba Wali Ram, by origin a kayastha—a member of the scribal and clerical caste—from Varanasi. Wali would become a renunciate in later life, closely associated with some of the leading Sufi masters of the age, and in the years before his death, in 1667/8, emerged as a revered mystic in his own right. Besides his Persian rendition of “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” as the Gulzar-i-Hal (“The Rose Garden of Absorption”), a number of other treatises and translations are attributed to him (Chand & Abidi ca. 1961). Although, unlike the Persian translation of the Upanishads that had been achieved by Dara Shikoh himself, “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” was not to reach the West in its Persian incarnation,29 its preser- ________

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