Dara Shikoh

Works

• 1655The Confluence of the Two Seas

  Short Persian treatise that sets Sufi and Hindu terms side by side – the elements, the senses, the divine names, the soul, the stages of creation and liberation – and argues that the seekers of truth in both traditions differ in words rather than in substance.

• 1657The Greatest Secret (Persian translation of the Upanishads)

  Persian translation of fifty Upanishads, made in 1657 with the help of pandits and introduced by Dara Shikoh as the “hidden book” of the Qur’an; A.-H. Anquetil-Duperron translated it into Latin as Oupnek’hat (1801–02), the version in which Schopenhauer read the Upanishads.

Position

Dara Shikoh is on the map for his attempt to show that Sufi metaphysics and Hindu philosophy speak of the same truth. In The Confluence of the Two Seas (Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn, 1655) he set side by side the terms of the Sufis and of the Indian “monotheists” – for the elements, the senses, the divine names and attributes, the soul, the stages of creation and liberation – and concluded that he found no difference between them except in words. His framework is the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) in the tradition of Ibn Arabi, which he combined with Vedantic ideas; at the same time he described himself as a Hanafi Muslim and a Qadiri Sufi committed to God’s unity. In 1657 he had fifty Upanishads translated into Persian with the help of pandits as The Greatest Secret (Sirr-i akbar); in his preface he argued that the “hidden book” mentioned in the Qur’an (56:78) is none other than the Upanishads. This translation had a long afterlife in Europe: Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron put it into Latin as Oupnek’hat (1801–02), and it was in this version that Arthur Schopenhauer read the Upanishads from 1814 onward and praised them in the preface to The World as Will and Representation. In India he has been remembered, much later, as a symbol of a tolerant alternative to Aurangzeb; Supriya Gandhi’s biography (2020) reads him in the context of the courtly and Sufi culture of his own time.

Life & context

Muhammad Dara Shikoh was born on 20 March 1615 in Ajmer, the eldest son of Prince Khurram, the later emperor Shah Jahan, and Mumtaz Mahal. He was his father’s favourite and designated successor and held high military and administrative offices. As a young man he turned to the Qadiri Sufi order: he became a follower of Mian Mir in Lahore and a disciple of Mian Mir’s successor Mulla Shah Badakhshi. He wrote lives of the Sufi saints, treatises on the Sufi path, poems, and records of conversations with the Hindu ascetic Baba Lal Das, and he was a patron of painting, music and architecture. When Shah Jahan fell ill in 1657, a war of succession broke out among his sons; Dara was defeated by his younger brother Aurangzeb, captured and brought to Delhi, and executed on 30 August 1659 on a charge of heresy.

Further main works

• The Greatest Secret (Sirr-i akbar, 1657), Persian translation of fifty Upanishads
• The Ship of the Saints (Safīnat al-awliyāʾ), lives of Sufi saints
• The Tranquillity of the Saints (Sakīnat al-awliyāʾ)
• The Compass of Truth (Risāla-yi Ḥaqq-numā)