Writing Confucian History in an Indian Language

Abstract

This article uses a case study of an Urdu translation of the classical Chinese Shujing (Book of Documents) to bring to light a process of multiperson, mediated, and ultimately transimperial translation in which European source texts played crucial roles in transmitting detailed knowledge of China to the Indian public sphere. After outlining the theoretical approach of transimperial history and its value for Asian intellectual history, the article positions the Urdu Shujing in relation to earlier Indian and Middle Eastern accounts of China whose triangulated transmission—from East Asia to Europe and thence to South or West Asia—set various precedents for the translation of the Shujing from a prior English translation. The article then focuses on the Urdu version to reveal the transimperial mechanisms it used to not only translate and transliterate classical Chinese but also to “transcalculate” dates and render Chinese history comparable to both Europe's and India's past. The conclusions argue that, from Ming China via the early modern Catholic empires to the occult subcurrents of British colonial culture, the transimperial pathways along which Confucian history reached India were ultimately Eurasian rather than narrowly inter-Asian in scope. This reliance on earlier European translations would later recur with the spread of “world literature” in the postcolonial era.