Photo: Mughals visit an Encampment of "Sadhus" from the St. Petersburg Album. India, Mughal dynasty, ca. 1635. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper @ St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts.
L'IREMAM accueille Stefania Cavaliere
Pour une intervention intitulée : “Linguistic, religious and cultural transcreations in the Indo-Persian milieu. The case of three crossed translations of an Indian classical allegory”.
Jeudi 20 avril 2023, 14h, MMSH, salle Duby, Aix-en-Provence. Séance animée par Fabrizio Speziale et Homa Lessan Pezechki.
The Prabodhacandrodaya’s textual tradition is essential in getting the big picture of Early Modern Indian intellectual history. In its journey from the Sanskrit matrix into its several renderings, this tale evolves and adapts to various cultural and linguistic settings. The peculiarity of this corpus is the presence of many interconnected versions that contain references to each other. An emblematic case is represented by three versions that, besides keeping each one a link with the Sanskrit matrix, are mutually interrelated. The earliest one is the Braj Bhāṣā version by the poet Nanddās (1570), affiliated with the sect of Vitthalnāth. This text might have played a crucial role in the Prabodhacandrodaya’s textual transmission, representing the link between the Sanskrit original and the Persian translation, Gulzār-i ḥāl by Banvālīdās (d. 1667-68). As with other philosophical texts of the Hindu tradition, the Prabodhacandrodaya became popular in the Mughal court milieu because it represented a link between Sufi mysticism and Vedānta. Apart from epitomising the Indo-Persian aesthetics of the 17th century, the Gulzār-i ḥāl reflects the intellectual and socio-cultural context in which it was produced. A crisscrossing between oral and written transmission reflects the multidimensional, multifaceted intellectual activity that was a translation in the Indo-Islamicate milieu. The Gulzār-i ḥāl provoked reactions in different Hindu sectarian traditions and inspired a new ‘emended’ Braj Bhāṣā version of the text, the Prabodhacandrodaya Nāṭak by Brajvāsīdās (1760).
Stefania Cavaliere est professeure associée en langue et littérature hindi au département d'études asiatiques, africaines et méditerranéennes de l'université de Naples "L'Orientale", en Italie. Après son doctorat en études indologiques à l'Université de Turin, elle a obtenu une bourse postdoctorale de l'Université de Milan et de l'Université Jawaharlal Nehru, New Delhi, Inde. En 2015, elle a été chercheuse invitée Fulbright au département des études sur le Moyen-Orient et l'Asie du Sud (MESAAS) de l'université Columbia, à New York. Ses principaux domaines de recherche sont la poésie de cour hindi, l'esthétique indienne et ses développements dans la tradition littéraire vernaculaire, la dynamique des traductions dans le contexte multilingue de l'Empire moghol, et l'histoire intellectuelle indienne du début de l'époque moderne. Elle s'intéresse également aux humanités numériques appliquées au patrimoine culturel.