Razmnama

• 1. Introduction

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  The Razmnama arrived at the Mughal court not as a curiosity but as a command. Emperor Akbar ordered a Persian translation of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, one of the longest literary works in human history, containing a hundred thousand verses known as shlokas. The project was not a quiet scholarly exercise. It involved Hindu Brahman scholars, Muslim theologians, court poets, and a rotating cast of translators who worked in shifts, faced dismissal, and were sent into exile when they fell short. What drove one of the most powerful rulers in the world to bring this ancient Hindu epic into the literary language of his court? And what happened to the men who had to carry that burden?

• 2. Akbar's House of Translation

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  In 1574, Akbar established what he called a Maktab Khana, a House of Translation, at his new capital Fatehpur Sikri. The project was institutional from the start. Sanskrit texts including the Rajatarangini and the Ramayana were targeted alongside the Mahabharata, all to be rendered into Persian, the literary language his court used. The logic was political and intellectual at once. Persian was the common tongue of the Mughal elite, and Akbar wanted the great texts of the subcontinent he governed to be readable by that elite. The order to formally begin translating the Mahabharata specifically came in 1582. Work on the actual text ran from 1584 to 1586, producing the first complete illustrated copy.

• 3. The Translation Method

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  Naqib Khan, son of Abd al-Latif Husayni, sat at the center of the operation. Brahman scholars including Deva Misra, Satavadhana, Madhusudana Misra, Caturbhuja, and Shaykh Bhavan read the Sanskrit aloud and explained it in Hindi. Naqib Khan then rendered that explanation into Persian prose. The poet Shaikh Faizi was later brought in to elevate the prose into elegant verse, though he too managed only two of the eighteen chapters. The contemporary writer Badauni, who was personally summoned by Akbar on the third night of the project, recorded in his Muntakhab al-tavarikhi that the emperor had the text explained to Naqib Khan personally for several nights before the wider team assembled. Badauni himself completed two chapters in three or four months. The inscription preserved in some copies notes that Naqib Khan completed his portion in one and a half years.

• 4. Badauni's Bitter Record

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  Abd al-Qadir Badauni did not love this assignment. His account in the Muntakhab al-tavarikhi calls the Mahabharata a stock of useless fables, and he describes the project's chief coordinator, Sultan Haji Thanesari, meeting an ugly end: dismissed for some fault and sent away to Bhakkar, his native city. Badauni's closing judgment on his fellow translators is memorable. He writes that most of the interpreters and translators are in hell along with the Kurus and Pandavas, the warring families at the heart of the epic itself. His tone makes plain that for a devout Muslim scholar, working intimately with Hindu scripture was a trial rather than an honor. His account also notes that the nobles of the court were ordered by Akbar to have copies transcribed, explicitly as a way of obtaining blessings. Abul Fazl, the historian in Akbar's court, wrote a preface running to the length of two quires, and in folio 11 of the Jaipur copy he gives the date 1588 for that preface.

• 5. The Illustrated Manuscripts

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  Four illustrated versions of the Razmnama are known to survive. The first and most complete was made between 1584 and 1586 and is now held at the City Palace Museum in Jaipur. Its artists included Basawan, Daswanth, and Lal. The manuscript carries the seals of Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Shah Alam, tracking its passage through successive Mughal reigns. It contains 169 full-page miniatures, written by Khwaja Inayatullah on paper from Dowlatabad. A second, more elaborate copy was completed between 1598 and 1599, with 161 paintings; it was explicitly designed to be sent as gifts to members of royal families, helping them understand Hindu religion. The third copy, called the Birla manuscript, is dated 1605 and is housed at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkata. A fourth, from around 1616-1617, has only two or more miniatures currently identified. Of the second copy, the final five parts from its eighteen sections are now British Library MS Or. 12076, while other pages from that same copy are spread across collections in North America, Europe, and India.

• 6. Thomas Holbein Hendley's Reproductions

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  In 1883 and 1884, the British administrator Thomas Holbein Hendley reproduced 147 illustrations from the Jaipur Razmnama in his book Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition. This act of reproduction, made nearly three centuries after the manuscript was created, brought the images to a wider audience at a moment when photographic and print reproduction was becoming viable for detailed artworks. Of the 169 miniatures in the Jaipur copy, 147 made it into Hendley's publication, leaving 22 unrepresented. The distribution of the second copy to emirs throughout Akbar's kingdom, and the later dispersal of its pages to institutions across three continents, shows how a manuscript commissioned as a royal gift became one of the most geographically scattered Mughal documents.