[IMC Bombay] Talk on Dara Shikuh: Hindus and Muslims in Mughal Political Thought

[Shekhar Krishnan]

Indian Aesthetics, Department of Philosophy
University of Mumbai

Invites you to a Special Lecture on Thursday, September 19th, 2002 at 6.00 p.m.

Rachana Sansad, 1st Floor, Shankar Ghanekar Marg, Prabhadevi, Mumbai.



DARA SHIKUH: HINDUS AND MUSLIMS IN MUGHAL POLITICAL THOUGHT


Whatever their political or ideological leanings,  intellectuals 
today have only the language of liberalism to analyze religious 
relations in India. This language, which relies upon notions such as 
interest and representation, is obviously an inheritance of the 19th 
century state, and cannot be read back either to the period before 
colonialism, or indeed extended to large sections of Indian social 
life, which remain only fitfully within the areas of liberal 
categories even today. Yet it is precisely this language that 
continues to inform studies of Indian history and society.

Is it possible to think about this history and this society outside 
liberal categories? I want to try and
do so, in a kind of counter-factual exercise, by looking at one of 
the privileged sites of this language: religious relations in the 
Mughal Empire. In particular I will be looking at the Mughal prince 
Dara Shikuh, so often and anachronistically described by nationalist 
historians as a kind of pre-figurement of the Nehruvian secularist 
ideal.

The point of my paper being to try and think of other ways in which 
politics has been and can be productively thought about in India, one 
in which many of the categories the liberal intellectual takes for 
granted are put into question. To do this I will concentrate on two 
primary texts by Dara Shikuh: his translation of the Upanishads, the 
Sirr-I -Akbar, and his treatise on The Meeting Place of the Two 
Oceans, Majma al-Bahrayn.



Faisal Devji is Head of Graduate Studies at the Institute of Ismaili 
Studies in London. He did his PhD in the Department of History at the 
University of Chicago, where he has also been a lecturer, and was a 
Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University.
_____

Shekhar Krishnan
9, Supriya, 2nd Floor
Plot 709, Parsee Colony Road No.4
Dadar, Bombay 400014
India