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.
