In the year 1597 CE, the South Asian Mughal court commissioned a team of Muslim and Hindu scholars to
translate a popular (Hindu) Sanskrit treatise – known as the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha – into the Persian language. This talk seeks to reconstruct the intellectual processes that underlie this collaborative translation, examining the translators’ decisions regarding the Persian rendition of a single Sanskrit word: saṃkalpa, a term with denotations as varied as “imagination,” “mental construction,” “desire,” “will,” and
“intention.” In teasing out the multiple Hindu, Muslim, and even Buddhist philosophical currents that informed the translators’ choices, I will map out the relevant historical intellectual networks at play, spanning a geographical range from Spain to the Middle East and Iran to Central and South Asia – and arguably beyond.