Ojaswini Shekhawat, PhD Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, holds a talk titled “Love in the City of Death: Sanskrit and Persian Narratives about the Hindu–Muslim Lovers of Mughal Banaras.”

Magnetic attraction, religious difference, doubt and desire, heartbreak and grief—“love” appears in many forms in the understudied archive of Sanskrit and Persian stories about the Hindu and Muslim lovers of Mughal Banaras. These transgressive and often erotic tales mark the emergence of the trope of star-crossed inter-religious lovers in the late seventeenth century, shaped by the multilingual literary milieu of early modern North India.

At the center of these narratives stands the city of Banaras (modern-day Varanasi), portrayed in Sanskrit māhātmyas as the most sacred Hindu pilgrimage site and a hub of learning, yet also depicted in bawdy Sanskrit and Persian mathnawī  texts as the ideal place for “flirting and love-making.” By reading these stories together as one archive, this talk reveals how authors across Sanskrit and Persian traditions co-created intertwined literary visions of Banaras and its star-crossed lovers.