Sanskrit Grammars and Lexicons of Persian

What is it about?

Were premodern Sanskrit thinkers interested in Persian, Arabic, or Islamic thought? Scholars have long answered no. On the contrary, in this article I reconstruct the long, diverse history of Sanskrit grammars and lexicons of Persian from the fourteenth until the eighteenth centuries. Sanskrit thinkers had long privileged grammatical analysis, and so turned to this long-standing discipline to make sense of the entry of a new language, religion, and culture into South Asia.

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Why is it important?

This article investigates a crucial arena of cross-cultural interaction in premodern and early modern India. Sanskrit and Persian co-existed on the subcontinent for centuries, and yet few scholars have identified areas where thinkers from each tradition chose to interact with one another. I identify grammatical analysis a as one such key arena. The article also shows how to recover the historical and intellectual impacts of technical discourses more generally.