‘I Will Make a <i>ṭīkā</i> ’: Translation, Commentary and Tradition in Nājar Ānandrām’s <i>Paramānanda Prabodha</i>

In the early eighteenth century Bikaner court, an official named Najar anandram wrote a text called the Paramananda Prabodha (Understanding of the Highest Bliss), a commentary or tika on the Bhagavad Gita in early Hindi, explicitly drawing from the influential fourteenth century Sanskrit commentary, the Subodhini, by Sridhara Svami. This paper examines the complex relationship of the Paramananda Prabodha to the Subodhini in order to ask: what protocols were used by the author of the Hindi work to render the earlier Sanskrit commentary comprehensible to the new audiences that vernacular commentaries were now addressing? It further explores what this means for our understanding of translation practices in the early modern period in North India. I suggest that the work of Najar anandram, and of other writers like him, can be more clearly understood by taking multilingualism and translation practices as central features of exegetical writing in South Asia.