This book is an important contribution to two of the most exciting fields in South Asian scholarship over the past decade: early modern literary history and studies of the Mughal court. It provides a wealth of new information about the impact of Sanskrit intellectuals and Sanskrit knowledge on Mughal culture, a largely overlooked aspect of the empire. Mughal encounters with Sanskrit occurred from approximately 1560 to 1660; after that Hindi became the preferred medium into Indian knowledge, which received less imperial patronage from emperor Aurangzeb. Much of Audrey Truschke's book concerns the even shorter timespan from the 1580s to the 1610s, when Mughal involvement with Sanskrit reached its peak under emperors Akbar and Jahangir. In demonstrating the continuing significance of Sanskrit into the seventeenth century, as well as the multilingualism at the imperial centre, Truschke extends the insights of her mentors Sheldon Pollock and Allison Busch in a new direction. The resulting work will lay to rest once and for all any doubts that the Indian environment shaped Mughal kingship and ideology in notable ways.

Truschke may not be the first scholar to point out the presence of Sanskrit in and around the Mughal court, but she has studied the phenomenon far more extensively than anyone previously. The prodigious amount of research she has conducted, including the reading of numerous unpublished manuscripts in multiple archives, is impressive. Even more noteworthy is Truschke's command of Persian in addition to Sanskrit; this makes it possible for her to trace the trajectories of Sanskrit texts as they were adapted and transformed into Persian forms. Truschke gives equal attention to both sides of the multicultural “encounters” that transpired at the imperial court – thus, three of her substantive chapters deal exclusively with Sanskrit texts and their authors, while the remaining three cover the assimilation of Sanskritic knowledge into Persianate culture.

Chapter 1 establishes the presence of numerous Sanskrit-knowing intellectuals at the Mughal court, discusses their role as informants, and describes the titles they were granted by the emperors. While Brahmans must also have frequented the court, most of the Sanskrit intellectuals we can definitively place at court were Jain ascetics. Two Jains are among the six authors covered in chapter 2, each of whom composed a Sanskrit text for a Mughal emperor or high-ranking noble. Whether the Mughal elite understood Sanskrit well or not, Truschke notes in a perceptive rumination on the issue of reception that Sanskrit was clearly considered an effective means by which to address them. A diverse group of Sanskrit works reflecting some kind of engagement with the Mughals are the focus of chapter 5. Most are Jain accounts of interactions between their leaders and Mughal emperors, but also described is a set of poems in praise of a Brahman who received tax concessions from emperor Shah Jahan, king-lists that include the Mughals, and miscellaneous other texts.

Truschke's exploration of the Persian afterlives of Sanskrit texts begins in Chapter 3, on the Razmnāmah or “translation” of the Mahābhārata epic. This is the strongest section of the book, to my mind, perhaps because it contains the most sustained analysis of a single topic. The Mahābhārata’s political significance for Akbar is well explained; particularly interesting are Truschke's observations on the substitutions and abridgements that were made in order to reduce the religious content of the Sanskrit text and make its view of war more positive. The incorporation of Sanskrit knowledge into the Ā’īn-i Akbarī, a gazetteer-type text written by Akbar's confidant Abu al-Fazl, is the subject of chapter 4. The bulk of Truschke's discussion pertains to traditional Sanskrit knowledge – geography, philosophy, literature, etc. – summarized in book 4, resulting in quite a skewed assessment of Ā’īn-i Akbarī as a whole, since it contains much knowledge about India that does not derive directly from Sanskrit. Truschke argues that Abu al-Fazl's motive was to promote serious reflection by Mughal nobles and intellectuals on the merits of ideas that originated in a different cultural tradition, as part of the policy of ṣulḥ-i kull or universal peace. A variety of Persian texts are treated in chapter 6, including Mughal translations of the Rāmāyaṇa epic, an interpretation of the Mahābhārata from the Deccan, and translations of religious texts sponsored by the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh.

In such a short review, I cannot do justice to the varied content of this extensively-researched book. If anything, it is too thorough in its coverage, leading to a list-like effect at times. The logic behind the sequence of presentation is also unclear: why, for instance, were the discussions of the Persian versions of the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata epics separated by several chapters? More importantly, the case for Sanskrit is sometimes overstated, as in the claim that “much of the Mughal past can be reconstructed only from Sanskrit texts” (p. 245) or “the Mughals articulated their political claims largely through interacting with the Sanskrit tradition” (p. 4). Nonetheless, Culture of Encounters represents a major advance in our understanding of South Asian political culture and should be read by all of those with a serious interest in the pre-colonial era. The convincing evidence of Sanskrit's significance in the multicultural and multilinguistic milieu of the Mughal court it contains will certainly guide future research; its arguments and interpretations are likewise sure to stimulate further debate on the elite culture of the Mughal empire.