On Equal Terms: The Equivocal Origins of an Early Mughal Indo-Persian Vocabulary

摘要

The Qasidah dar Lughat-i Hindi ('A Qasidah on Hindi Terms'), composed in the early sixteenth century, is an unusual example of the nisab genre of multilingual vocabularies in verse, providing Persian glosses for various terms drawn from a language the text labels Hindi. The author of the vocabulary, Yusuf Khurasani 'Yusufi', was a physician who followed the first Mughal-Timurid emperor, Babur, from Afghanistan to India. This paper examines the content and the arrangement of Yusufi's vocabulary, paying particular attention to the means through which 'Yusufi' was able to assert semantic equivalences between lexical terms and the materials with which they correspond. It concludes by contrasting the Hindi to Persian glossing directionality of this work with the Persian to Hindi directionality prevailing in later examples of the nisab genre, arguing that the Qasidah reflects a period when practitioners of the Persianate yunani system of medical knowledge engaged with Indic counterparts in dynamic and especially fruitful ways.