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Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016). Pp. 368. $34.00 paper. ISBN: 9780268041519

intellectual culture” (p. 201). Insofar as anyone might imagine that culture to have been aloof from surrounding political goings on, this is a welcome dismissal. But otherwise, it is hard to think of an early modern culture that did not bear these features. Chapter 6, “Incorporating Sanskrit into the Persianate World,” discusses courtly Persian translations of the Sanskrit texts, especially the Ramayan. a and the Razmnama. The penultimate section of the chapter comprises a survey of Persian royal lineages (rājāvalı̄), illustrating how ruling elites increasingly came to inscribe themselves into chronologies that integrated pre-Islamic and Islamic rule of India into a single stream. The final section offers a valuable conspectus of Dara Shikuh’s legacy, reassessing his interests in Sanskrit as far narrower than those of his predecessors and thus possibly having compromised his efforts to win the Mughal throne. The conclusion offers a valuable characterization of the Mughal court as a frontier or contact zone in which “members of largely discrete traditions came into contact with one another” (p. 232). It concludes with a reflection on the value for “imperial history” of the methods Truschke has adopted in this book. With reference to the latter, she writes: “Chief among the concerns of those who want to parse imperial formations ought to be literature, aesthetics, and cross cultural exchanges” (p. 247). It is worth recalling, though, that for Michel Foucault representations derived their value for the analysis of power from their locus in institutions and practices embedded within them. The human subject was thus not a freestanding recipient of such representations but situated within an identifiably empirical and constraining locus. This means that traditional scholarly consideration of, say, the mansabdārı̄ or Mughal military-administrative system as a technology of imperial power cannot be wholly displaced by attention to elite preoccupations with poetry and history. Rather, what remains to be answered is how such elite processes of subject formation may have related to the devolution of imperial power into nonelite locales, what if anything such aesthetics of royal self-fashioning may have meant in those locales, and what institutions outside courts may have mediated the power of the central and subimperial Mughal courts. Notwithstanding these reservations, the benefits of this book make it richly worth the while of cultural historians of Mughal India and literary scholars of precolonial Persian, Sanskrit, and South Asian vernacular literatures. All of them will discover in Culture of Encounters information on Persian and Sanskrit’s roughly century long affair with each other that is either unavailable or highly dispersed in any European language. At a time of rising Hindu jingoism in India, nonscholarly readers, too, may have their historical imaginations beneficially complicated by this accessibly written study of the last flourishing of Sanskrit literary culture in the heart of Islamic imperial power.