Discussion Group: Translation as Cultural Mediation? Eighteenth-century French Treatises on Indian History
Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-1799) was a French adventurer who spent twenty-five years in different parts of India. While working as the military advisor to Shuja ud- Daula, the Nawab of Awadh and prime vizier of the Mughal Empire, Gentil became the first European to employ three Indian artists for ten years. In Awadh, he amassed a collection-amounting to more than 470 paintings and 150 manuscripts-both through collecting and commissioning. Gentil also translated indigenous histories from Persian to French. Notably, French Indologist Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) heavily benefited from Gentil's networks and his orientalist pursuits. In this paper, I will study Gentil's activities as an early orientalist and translator. The first part will look at the choices he made while translating four ancient histories of India by Indigenous historians: Barani's Tarikh-i-Firozshahi (1357), Abul Fazl's Ain-i- Akbari (16th century), Firishta's Tarikh-i Firishta (17th century), and Sujan Rai's Khalasat at-Tawarikh (1696). The second part of the talk explores the compiling of his translated works-Abrégé des souverains (1772), Histoire métallique (1773), Abrégés des Rajas (1774) in his atelier in Faizabad, where three artists worked to illustrate his translations.
Aditi Gupta is a DPhil Candidate in French Studies at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Her research project focuses on the life and work of Jean-Baptiste Gentil, an eighteenth-century French adventurer who spent twenty-five years in India. This project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Clarendon Fund. She is a contributor to the Indo-French Shared Heritage Project at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Paris. She has worked as a part-time visiting lecturer in French at the University of Westminster, London. Her research interests include the history of collections, connected histories, military memoirs and travel writing.
