Images of Wisdom, Visions of Rule: Visual Translation and the Politics of Knowledge in the Mughal Jūg Bāshishta, c. 1602

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Art

First Advisor

Barringer, Tim

Abstract

This dissertation is the first art-historical monograph on the Jūg Bāshishta, a nearly seventeenth-century illustrated manuscript produced at the Mughal court in 1602. Comprising three hundred and twenty-three folios of text interwoven with forty-one paintings, the Jūg Bāshishta is a Persian translation of the Sanskrit philosophical treatise Laghu-Yogavāsiṣtha, composed in Kashmir in the tenth century. It is the only surviving translation by the scholar Farmūlī commissioned for Emperor Akbar (r. 1556– 1605), and is unique for being both fully illustrated and preserved in its entirety. Challenging the prevailing attribution of the manuscript to Prince Salim, I establish—through close analysis of the introductory text and comparison with other illustrated works from Akbar’s reign—that the Jūg Bāshishta was produced in Akbar’s imperial atelier. This reattribution has significant implications for understanding the manuscript’s imagery and its place in the court’s visual program. Methodologically, my study combines close visual analysis with translation theory, intellectual history, and the study of transformative philosophy. I read the manuscript’s Persian text not merely as a linguistic rendering of a Sanskrit original, but as a cross-cultural act of conceptual transformation—one in which philosophical ideas were reconfigured to align with Mughal imperial ideology. By situating the paintings within this translational and philosophical frame, I uncover their role as a deliberate visual strategy through which the Mughal court articulated sovereignty in opposition to the spiritual authority of rival communities, including Nāth yogīs, Vaiṣnavites, sanyāsīs, and Brahmins. I show how the imagery inverts the master–disciple hierarchy, portraying the royal disciple as spiritually superior to their teacher—here reduced to a conduit—and modeling these figures on sects that interacted directly with the court. The manuscript further embeds the Mughal emperor within a lineage of ideal rulers from Persian and Sanskritic traditions, such as Iskander and Rām, thereby positioning Akbar within an ancient, cosmopolitan genealogy of enlightened kingship. In doing so, it legitimizes his role as sole arbiter in religious disputes and reinforces his political alliances. Finally, I argue that the Jūg Bāshishta’s paintings extend this vision beyond interreligious authority to encompass the social order at large, visually cataloguing and subordinating diverse groups within the Mughal polity through the depiction of the body and its interaction with the environment. In these images, sovereignty emerges as a concept that deliberately transgresses caste boundaries while simultaneously affirming the emperor’s spiritual and temporal supremacy.

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