Hippology Between Indic and Persianate Textual Traditions: The Śalihotra of Gulbarga

Abstract This article looks at the translation of Indian sources on horses in the Persianate culture of South Asia. Horses were an essential tool of Muslim armies and their military hegemony in South Asia. In the regional sultanates, local rulers competed in making Indian sources on hippology available in the Persian language. This contribution focuses on the Tarjoma-ye Sālutar (The Translation of Śalihotra , 1407–8), a translation of an Indian text on hippology produced in Gulbarga for Ahmad I Shāh Vali ( r. 1422–35). The Tarjoma-ye Sālutar was rendered into Persian by ʿAbdollāh b. Safi via an intermediate translation in a vernacular language made by a local scholar named Durgadāsa. The use of intermediate translations has often been considered a practice that developed at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar ( r . 1556–1605). Yet the method of translation used for the Tarjoma-ye Sālutar shows that this practice goes back to the Sultanate period. This article explores the contents of the book, including sections dealing with omens taken from horses and veterinary medicine. Furthermore, it explores the way translated materials were adapted to render them more suitable for the new Muslim readership.