WHERE THE TWO OCEANS MEET: AN ATTEMPT AT HINDU-MUSLIM RAPPROCHEMENT IN THE THOUGHT OF DARA SHIKUH

I. Introduction Dara Shikuh (d. 1659), the Mughal prince and heir apparent, was also a scholar and a mystic in his own right. (1) He was popular among Hindus as well as Muslims and had connections with scholars and mystics belonging to both traditions. He has been recognized in history for his translations of some fifty Upanishads into Persian. This set of translations, known as Sirr-i akbar (the great secret), became an important and influential work in Europe via Anquetil Duperron's 1801 translation into Latin. (2) Dara also wrote a number of texts related to Sufism and comparative (Hindu-Islamic) mysticism. In the latter category, we find Majma' al-bahrayn (meeting place of the two oceans), which was Dara's attempt to make manifest the spiritual affinity he recognized between the two distinct religious traditions of Hinduism and Islam. Dara tried to merge Hindu and Islamic mystical ideas and, by way of this syncretism, sought to unite the two major religious communities of India. Thus, the "two oceans" in his Majma' al-bahrayn refers to the Hindu and Islamic traditions, each of which he regarded as a repository of knowledge and wisdom (a la Islamic monotheism). In Dara's final analysis, each of these traditions is a reflection of the other. Dara, a Sufi, had a deep interest in and appreciation for Hindu mystical ideas. Based on his knowledge and mystical experience, Dara argued throughout his scholarship and comparative study of Islam and Hinduism for a certain parity or "transparence" between the two in the realm of "essence." Giving little credence or importance to many obvious disparities ("walls") or to the theological, philosophical, cultural, and social boundaries separating the two religions, Dara argued that Islam and Hinduism both upheld monotheism or tawhid (the Islamic doctrine of the oneness of God) and, therefore, were at par with each other. He studied Hindu and Islamic traditions and claimed to be familiar with their religious texts--chiefly the Qur'an and the Upanishads. In his comparative study of these texts, he focused on specific terminology but interpreted them syncretistically. (3) He approached these texts as a mystic; therefore, his analysis was not based on historical or textual methods. From a mystical perspective, Dara considered the similarities between these texts to be their essence and regarded their differences as merely accidental. The metaphoric titles of Dara's aforementioned works reveal his vision of Hindu and Muslim religious truths. For example, Majma' al-bahrayn is an allegorical reference to the meeting of the truths of these two faiths. This work contains twenty chapters or sections, each of which includes a discussion of Hindu and Islamic teachings with respect to the topic of the chapter. The phrase "majma' al-bahrayn" itself is found in the qur'anic verse 18:60, where it is taken to mean the meeting of two "streams"--one representing the esoteric and the other the exoteric forms of knowledge, each considered to be equally valid (that is, divine). (4) This is not the representation Dara intended, however, as he argued for spiritual parity between Hindu and Islamic truths. In other words, instead of using the qur'anic sense, where the two equal yet different parts of religious truth are seen as such in a complementary modality, Dara applied the metaphor to two distinct traditions uniquely preserving the esoteric aspects of each. He wrote in his introduction to Majma' al-bahrayn that he found "no difference in the perception of truth except the literal one" and that Hindu and Islamic traditions are "two truth-knowing sects." (5) Dara's other major work was his translation of fifty Upanishads, Sirr-i akbar. By the time he set out on this ambitious project, Dara (as a Muslim) had already attempted to define the Hindu tradition as "monotheistic" and therefore placed it on the same level as Islam. As noted in the following, this characterization of the Hindu tradition as monotheistic is problematic at best, not least because the Advaita Vedantic monistic view cannot be reconciled with monotheism without stretching the interpretation on both sides of the theological divide. …