Colloquium Series: Making a Monotheistic Scripture: The Sirr-i akbar’s afterlife in South Asia. Supriya Gandhi

In 1867, the Punjabi reformer, Kanhaiya Lal Alakhdhari, completed an Urdu translation of fifty Upaniá¹£ads. Alakhdhari, who was later to play a key role in establishing the Arya Samaj in the Punjab, expressed a concern that Hindus, unlike Muslims and Christians, were unfamiliar with their sacred texts. His translation was based on the Sirr-i akbar, an earlier Persian version produced by the Mughal prince, Dara Shikoh, in 1657. Dara Shikoh argued that the Upaniá¹£ads constituted a divinely revealed scripture, which held the key to the Quran’s mysteries. How did a seventeenth-century gesture of cross-cultural translation within an Islamic interpretive frame come to inform a sectarian Hindu project in the nineteenth century? This talk considers the reception history of the Sirr-i akbar in South Asia, as a lens for examining issues of language and scripture during the emergence of modern Hinduism.