Evaluate the aim and impact of the translation of Sanskrit scriptures into Persian language during Mughal period.

Answer:

The translation of Sanskrit works into Persian, promoted above all by Akbar and later by Dara Shikoh, was a deliberate cultural project whose aims were at once political and intellectual, and whose impact was to build lasting bridges between India's two great literary and religious traditions.

The translations and their aims

• Akbar's maktab khana rendered the Mahabharata as the Razmnama, along with the Ramayana, the Atharvaveda and Lilavati.
• The aim was to foster mutual understanding and to legitimise Mughal rule over Hindu subjects.
• It advanced Akbar's ideal of sulh-i-kul, or universal peace and tolerance.
• Dara Shikoh translated the Upanishads as the Sirr-i-Akbar and wrote the Majma-ul-Bahrain, the mingling of the two oceans.

The scholars and the method

• Badauni, though personally resentful of the task, worked on the Razmnama translation.
• Faizi and Abul Fazl gave the renderings literary polish and philosophical framing.
• Hindu pandits explained the Sanskrit orally while Persian scholars composed the text.
• The illustrated Razmnama manuscripts became splendid works of Mughal painting.

The impact

• Made Hindu philosophy and epic accessible to Persian-reading elites, enriching Indo-Islamic intellectual life.
• Encouraged a syncretic and tolerant outlook, though it also provoked orthodox criticism.
• Dara's Upanishad translation, rendered into Latin as the Oupnek'hat, reached Europe and influenced Schopenhauer.

The translation movement thus aimed at cultural synthesis and political accommodation, and its impact was a durable bridge between Sanskritic and Persianate learning. It remains, as historians observe, among the finest expressions of the composite culture that the Mughals actively fostered.