"Not every book on premodern India finds its theoretical inspiration in the jet stream! Shankar Nair examines a pivotal work of Mughal translation and shows how it channels huge vortexes of Islamic and Hindu intellectual culture. The result is a masterwork, and its own jet stream freshens the religious air we breathe today."—John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement
"Nair exhibits a breathtaking command of languages, textual traditions, and intellectual cultures in this pioneering study of the crisscrossing of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic cultural jet streams in sixteenth-century India. This immensely erudite book discovers philosophical ingenuity in the early modern translation of a Sanskrit metaphysical tale, the
Laghu-Yoga-Vasistha, into Persian.”—Jonardon Ganeri, author of
The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700 "This book is an erudite and valuable contribution to the history of ideas in South Asia. Nair's deep linguistic and philosophical expertise illuminates the writings of three important if overlooked seventeenth-century thinkers, and shows us how their intellectual worlds met through the Jug Basisht translation project.”—Supriya Gandhi, author of
The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India "
Translating Wisdom is a welcome addition to the history of Hindu and Islamic interactions in early modern India, highlighting the subtleties of translation and the painstaking creation of a vocabulary important for both religions. Showing how interreligious exchanges worked centuries ago, Nair sheds light too on how better to study religions today.”—Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University
"Demonstrating how medieval Indian metaphysical teachings in Sanskrit were received, redacted, and refashioned by the Persian language against the backdrop of the Islamic intellectual tradition in early modern South Asia, this phenomenal study points to a truly unique moment in the history of cross-cultural translation and non-Western philosophy of religion."—Mohammed Rustom, author of
The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mulla Sadra 
