For centuries, the history of the Mughal Empire has been narrated primarily through a Persianate lens. Court chronicles like the Akbarnama, administrative documents, and imperial poetry in Persian have formed the foundational archive. This has created a powerful, but ultimately one-sided, narrative where the Mughals are understood as Timurid descendants, Islamic rulers, and Persianate patrons. But what if this is only half the story? What if we looked to the literary and intellectual output of the empire's majority Hindu population—written in the classical language of Sanskrit—to hear a different conversation? The rich and often overlooked world of Sanskrit texts from the Mughal period reveals a startlingly different, more complex, and deeply integrated portrait of Indo-Muslim rule, shattering the binary of "Muslim ruler vs. Hindu subject."

The Myth of the "Muslim" Archive

The standard narrative carries implicit assumptions: that Mughal culture was Persian culture, that state affairs were conducted in a Persian-Islamic framework, and that Sanskrit was the dying language of a subjugated religious community. Scholars like Wheeler Thackston have asserted, "The history of literature in the Mughal Empire is basically the history of Persian."

This perspective renders nearly invisible a vast corpus of work. As historian Audrey Truschke argues, this creates a form of academic "mythmaking" where we retell the same story from the same archive, missing a whole dimension of how the empire was perceived, engaged with, and legitimized by its diverse populace. The reality is that Sanskrit intellectual production not only continued but flourished under Mughal rule, often with direct and indirect imperial patronage.

Akbar Reimagined: The Jain Vishnu and the Compassionate King

The reign of Akbar (r. 1556–1605) is a prime example. While Abu'l Fazl's Akbarnama paints him as a philosopher-king within an Islamic and Persianate cosmology, Sanskrit poets present parallel—and equally propagandistic—visions tailored for different audiences.

1. Shanticandra's Kripārasakośa (Treasury of Compassion): This 1590 work by a Jain monk at Akbar's court reframes the emperor's ideology. Instead of Abu'l Fazl's ṣulḥ-i kull (universal peace), Shanticandra highlights kripā (compassion), a supreme Jain virtue. He praises Akbar's bans on animal slaughter and gambling, portraying him not just as a tolerant king, but as a Jain-inspired righteous ruler. He even recounts auspicious dreams of Akbar's mother, Hamida Banu Begum (whom he calls Choli Begum), comparing her to mothers of Jain tirthankaras, crafting a distinctly Indian royal lineage for the emperor.
2. The Grammarian Emperor: The poet Kṛṣṇadāsa wrote a Sanskrit grammar of the Persian language at Akbar's behest. In his introduction, he makes a stunning theological argument: Since the god Brahma cannot incarnate on earth, the divine Vishnu descended into a family of foreigners (mleccha) who harmed cows and Brahmins in order to protect them. That incarnation was Akbar. Here, Akbar is seamlessly woven into the fabric of Hindu divine kingship, an idea almost entirely absent in the Persian sources.

The Imperial Project of Translation: A Multilingual Enterprise

One of Akbar's most significant cultural initiatives was the translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian. This was not a minor side project but, as Truschke notes, "the most sustained, resource-intensive cultural project that Akbar's court ever undertook."

Works like the Razmnama (Persian Mahabharata), Yogavasiṣṭha, and historical texts were lavishly illustrated and transcribed. This project reveals crucial truths:

1. It was a Two-Way Street: The process was multilingual. Pandits explained texts in Hindi, which scribes translated into Persian. The resulting texts often retained hundreds of Sanskrit and Hindi loanwords, creating a new hybrid literary lexicon.
2. It Undercuts Religious Binaries: That a "Muslim" court would spend vast resources translating "Hindu" epics and philosophy shatters the idea of rigid religious opposition. It was an act of political intelligence, cultural appropriation, and genuine curiosity.
3. Artistic Synthesis: The paintings in these manuscripts, like a Mughal-style court of Rama, visually blend identities. Is the enthroned figure Rama or Akbar? The ambiguity, scholars suggest, was likely intentional—a form of political allegory praising the living emperor through epic archetypes.

The Shah Mirs of Kashmir: A "Muslim" Dynasty in a Sanskrit Historical Tradition

An even starker example comes from the Shah Mir dynasty (1339–1561) in Kashmir. Their core historical record is not in Persian, but in Sanskrit works like Jonarāja's and Śrīvara's Rājataraṅgiṇīs.

These state-sponsored histories depict the Shah Mir sultans in a purely Indic kingly mold. Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin (r. 1420–1470) is described as rescuing Kashmir from "mleccha" (foreign Muslim) oppressors, listening to Sanskrit texts, and being "friendly to Brahmins." The dynasty is traced to the god Shiva, and queens are praised for upholding "high-caste Hindu (Hinduka) customs."

This forces a radical question: If a dynasty uses Persian for some administration but sponsors Sanskrit histories that depict them as Hindu-style kings, are they best described as "Indo-Muslim"? The Sanskrit archive suggests they were understood and presented themselves first and foremost as Indian kings who happened to follow Islam—a nuance lost in our modern religious categories.

The 18th Century: Hybridity and Fragmentation

By the late Mughal period, as the empire fractured, Sanskrit intellectuals continued to engage with its politics in astonishingly hybrid ways. Lakshmīpati, writing in the 1710s about Mughal power struggles, composed Sanskrit texts that freely incorporated Persian vocabulary and even grammatical particles.

His work, like the translations before it, exists between linguistic and cultural registers. He compares Mughal ministers to figures from the Hindu epics and describes Mecca as the Islamic equivalent of Kashi (Varanasi). This is not the voice of a subjugated community but of a savvy intellectual navigating a complex, interconnected world that defies simple "Hindu vs. Muslim" or "Sanskrit vs. Persian" divisions.

Conclusion: Toward a Multilingual Mughal History

The testimony of Sanskrit texts demands a fundamental shift in how we write Mughal history. It argues against a single, Persian-defined "Mughal archive" in favor of a multilingual, multi-perspective archive.

Ignoring these sources is not just an omission of detail; it is a perpetuation of the colonial and nationalist myth that India's past can be neatly divided into separate, antagonistic religious compartments. As Audrey Truschke provocatively asks: if a history of Akbar that ignored the Akbarnama would be dismissed as invalid, why shouldn't we view a history that ignores all Sanskrit sources as similarly deficient?

The story revealed by Sanskrit is not one of simple resistance or surrender, but of active engagement, creative adaptation, and sophisticated political negotiation. It shows the Mughal Empire not as a foreign imposition, but as a polity that was being translated, interpreted, and legitimized within the enduring frameworks of Indic kingship, philosophy, and literary culture. To hear this different story is to recover a more authentic, complex, and ultimately more Indian, Mughal Empire.