Translating Jain Philosophy at the Confluence of Persianate Hinduism

In 1796, Claude Martin (1735-1800), a wealthy French officer of the East India Company living in Lucknow, commissioned the Brahman Delaram to translate into Persian two classical texts from the Digambara Jain philosophical tradition. Using the Braj Bhasa commentaries composed by the seventeenth-century Jain author Hemraj Pande, Delaram was able to access the original Prakrit texts of the eighth- and tenth-century philosophers Kundakunda and Nemicandra via an updated vernacularized version. His translations are as an exceptional document showing the hermeneutic tools that a Persian-speaking Brahman could use to parse the doctrinal system of Jainism. Delaram's language was markedly shaped by his familiarity with Advaita Vedanta and the "unity of being ( vahdat al-vojud)" school of Sufism, focused on ontological unity. More specifically, the Sufi-Advaita idiom that developed in Persian from the early Mughal period onward functioned for Delaram as a lens through which he could engage with the doctrinal diversity of India's religious landscape. His efforts to translate the unfamiliar and sometimes perplexing elements of Jainism reveal the complex modalities of crossing linguistic and religious boundaries through Persian in South Asia and their partial incommensurabilities.