The Unlikely Commentator: The Hermeneutic Reception of Śańkara’s Thought in the Interpretive Scholarship of Dārā Shukøh

The varieties of interreligious dialogue that Professor Leonard Swidler has advocated and practiced for the last several decades are not by any means novel initiatives; they have been occurring for millennia in many different parts of the world. Whether found in the comparisons between Roman and Vedic deities in the sixth book of Cesar’s Gallic Wars, the transmission of Buddhism from South to East Asia, or modern meetings of the Parliament of World Religions, spiritual traditions have persistently sought ways to explore and encounter one another’s ideas and ethical commitments. Of course, such encounters are never easy and, in fact, are often perilous. The sometimes complicated motives, hermeneutic complexities, dangers of misunderstanding, and possibly resultant mutual acrimony between traditions that can result from dialogue are formidable. But, the rewards of such encounters can also be unforeseen and offer lasting legacies and potential promise. One of the most dramatic illustrations of such dangers and rewards can be found in the creative interpretive attempt by the seventeenth-century Mughal prince Dārā Shukøh to see ancient Hindu texts as the first historical revelations of Islam.

The legend, established for centuries now, has it that the justification for the humiliating execution of Prince Dārā Shukøh by his brother Aurungzeb in 1659 was Dārā’s heresy. Of all his works dealing with the relation of brāhmiṇical and Islamic thought, we are told by contemporary sources that his original work, Majma’-ul Bahrain, and his translation of the Sirr-i Akbar were what provoked the charge.¹ Indeed, after the public punishment was carried out in the streets of Delhi, when the decapitated head of Dārā was brought to his younger brother inside of a box, the new Shah is reported to have uttered the eulogy: “as I did not look at this infidel’s face during his lifetime, I have no wish to do so now.”²

Of course, the fate of Dārā as a historical matter is much more attributable to his political and military misjudgment, having spent seven years thwarting the expansion campaigns of Aurungzeb and ineptly contesting his forces in the final battle for dynastic succession.³ However, the return of orthodox Islam to the Mughal court was to be the major legitimization for Aurungzeb’s rule, and so the perpetuation of the legend has made Dārā appear to his centuries of detractors as a decadent apostate in his great-grandfather Akbar’s tradition—and to his supporters as a tragic martyr for Hindu-Islamic concord in Indian civilization. It is quite ironic then that, as far as we know, Dārā had a much more hermeneutically self-conscious appraisal of his own scholarship, one that combined his personal spiritual interests with a desire to vindicate the universality of the qur’ānic worldview through a demonstration of how its monotheism was echoed in classical brāhmiṇical religious and philosophical texts. Though this agenda inspired him to see to the translations of sacred Vedic scriptures and practices into the then-open intellectual world of the empire, it also made him their unlikely commentator.

This can be gleaned most clearly from Dārā’s supervision of the translation of some fifty Upaniṣads during a six-month period in 1657, the Sirr-i Akbar.⁴ Dārā was a Qādiri Sufi, admittedly one whose associations with ascetics of other traditions steadily increased during the intellectual ferment that followed Akbar’s reign, yet one whose primary audience for these historic translations were members of the Ulema of the imperial court. As such, Dārā became a commentator on ancient Sanskrit philosophy, but he was a Muslim commentator who selected and presented texts and concepts for fellow Muslims. This seemingly elementary but very powerful fact is borne out in two pivotal ways. The first lies in the brutally frank reasons he stated in the work’s...