Sanjay Subrahmanyam - "In a Glass Darkly: Jesuit Advice for a Mughal Prince"

Sanjay Subrahmanyam; Distinguished Professor of History; Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences; University of California, Los Angeles

“In a Glass Darkly: Jesuit Advice for a Mughal Prince”

The genre of the "Mirror for Princes" was widely known across medieval and early modern Eurasia. This talk focuses on a curious text entitled "Adab us-Saltanat" or "Directorio dos Reys" that was written in the early seventeenth century and presented to the Mughal emperor, Jahangir (r. 1605-27). Its ostensible author is the Jesuit Jerome Xavier (1549-1617). But there is, in fact, a second author whose role deserves greater attention––a certain Maulana 'Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri. Between the two, they produced a hybrid work that follows the broad format of Indo-Persian "advice literature" (or akhlaq) while at the same time carrying some intriguing traces of a Machiavellian substratum.