Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia Paperback - 2020

From the rear cover

"Not every book on premodern India finds its theoretical inspiration in the jet stream! Shankar Nair examines a pivotal work of Mughal translation and shows how it channels huge vortexes of Islamic and Hindu intellectual culture. The result is a masterwork, and its own jet stream freshens the religious air we breathe today."--John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

"This book is an erudite and valuable contribution to the history of ideas in South Asia. Nair's deep linguistic and philosophical expertise illuminates the writings of three important if overlooked seventeenth-century thinkers, and shows us how their intellectual worlds met through the Jūg Bāsisht translation project."--Supriya Gandhi, author of The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India

"Translating Wisdom is a welcome addition to the history of Hindu and Islamic interactions in early modern India, highlighting the subtleties of translation and the painstaking creation of a vocabulary important for both religions. Showing how interreligious exchanges worked centuries ago, Nair sheds light too on how better to study religions today."--Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University

"Demonstrating how medieval Indian metaphysical teachings in Sanskrit were received, redacted, and refashioned by the Persian language against the backdrop of the Islamic intellectual tradition in early modern South Asia, this phenomenal study points to a truly unique moment in the history of cross-cultural translation and non-Western philosophy of religion."--Mohammed Rustom, author of The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mulla Sadra