This panel explores the varied political theologies of early modern Islamicate South Asia. Building off recent discussions which situate Islamicate political/religious expression within the spheres of both the transregional and the local, the papers in this panel explore the horizon of possibilities, many of them unconventional or novel, within South Asian Islamicate political theology. Regional and imperial sovereigns in this period and region constructed their own authority along several axes (linguistic, artistic, and religious), drawing strength from longstanding Islamic traditions of thought—doxographic, ethical, juridical and philosophical—even as regional particularities drove them to innovate. As theorized by Carl Schmitt, political theology assumed a fixed backdrop of metaphysics or theology; however, in the context of a culturally and religiously diverse early modern Islamicate South Asia, we do not find an analogously fixed backdrop, but rather an intermingling of traditions which allowed for more radical innovations in the political sphere.
In this paper, I focus on artistic achievement as a mode of establishing political authority in the context of the seventeenth-century courts of the Deccan Sultanates, located south of the Mughal Empire’s borders. I argue that in a set of multilingual and multi-genre texts produced at the court of Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II in Bijapur, authors propounded a form of divine kingship through depictions of the sultan as a skilled artist not only resembling, but in some cases surpassing, God as Creator. In so doing, I situate sixteenth-century Deccani claims to divine kingship amidst conceptions of the sovereign-as-artist located across the broader Islamic world. Finally, I suggest that while the Deccan Sultans’ claims to sovereignty have largely been linked to those of their Shi‘a neighbors, the Safavids, Ibrahim II had the Mughal emperor Akbar in mind as a perpetual foil when crafting his political-theological program.
Akbar’s reign (1556-1605) as Mughal emperor has always been notable for his massive sponsorship of Persian letters and Iranian intellectuals. This paper considers what was at stake politically and theologically in the decision to use Persian as the language of empire through examining the linguistic cosmology constructed by three groups of Iranian migrants courted and sponsored by Akbar: dictionary writers, and two occult Iranian groups known as Nuqṭavīs and Āẕarīs, both invested in the upheaval of the Islamo-Arabic order at the turn of the Islamic millennium. From their writings, I argue, a clear picture emerges of the hold occult ideas about a new “Persian age” had on Akbar’s millenarian project. I also consider the broad legacies of Akbar’s theologization of the Persian language as pertaining to issues of linguistic authority, vernacularization, and nationalist myth-making.
This paper explores the centrality that Krishna came to play as an ambiguous figure in the milieu of the “Mughal translation project." Krishna’s vilification as a deceitful magician by the poet Faiḍī in his Mahābhārat, and his elevation as a “sovereign” in Sabzavārī’s Garden of the Pure [Rauḍat ut-Ṭāhirīn] are both considered in the context of the Persian Haribans’ laborious translation of Krishna’s lineage. Linking these works is not only a philological genealogy but also a common field of force: a political theology which sought to frame Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar as an incarnational figure, an instantiation of divine logos bringing order to a hermeneutico-ontological domain stalked by deceitful pretenders. In this context, Vishnu—and Krishna in particular—served as an exemplar for the Akbarian project and as a competitor: at once a prefiguration of Akbar, and a sacred King belonging to a rival lineage sent into occultation by the Mughals.