Sarmad Kashani

Origins and early life

Sarmad Kashani was born about 1590 at Kashan in Persia into a Jewish merchant family described by a contemporary as a family of learned Yahuds, of the class they call Rabbanim, and he received a rabbinic education in Hebrew and in the Bible before anything else.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly what the sources say about what followed: after reaching Mughal India as a trader he is reported to have adopted Islam nominally, but scholars and his own quatrains describe that step as superficial, since he wrote that he was neither Jew nor Muslim nor Hindu, and he is recorded as discouraging Jews who wanted to convert. Some sources call his family Judaeo-Persian speaking Armenian merchants rather than Jews in the narrow sense, and the fiche notes the discrepancy while recording that every account agrees he was raised and educated as a Jew.

In India he abandoned trade and wealth, went about naked as an ascetic, and wrote Persian quatrains that are counted among the boldest mystical poetry of the period. With his companion Abhai Chand he produced a partial Persian translation of the Torah, one of the earliest attempts to render the Hebrew Bible for a Persian-reading public. He became a spiritual confidant of the crown prince Dara Shikoh, the translator of the Upanishads, and when Aurangzeb seized the throne Sarmad was tried for heresy and public nakedness and beheaded at Delhi in 1661. His tomb beside the Jama Masjid is still a place of pilgrimage.