What Indian traditions of yoga does this book represent?

What Indian traditions of yoga does this book represent? Under what circumstances would books have been written in Persian on yogic techniques that include summoning female spirits? How would a translator prepare a Persian-reading audience for this kind of subject, and what kind of Islamicate categories would be used to present material such as yoga and feminine deities?

Della Valle was fluent in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, so his plan to translate the work from Persian into his native Italian might have yielded the first European study of an Islamic interpretation of yoga. It is remarkable that, despite his theological criticism of the yogis, he found their divination and breathing practices to be effective; in this respect his ambivalence matches that of several Muslim students of yoga.

Unfortunately della Valle seems not to have fulfilled this translation project, for he only briefly discussed his collection of Oriental manuscripts in correspondence with European savants.[^2] The Persian text just described was among the codices that he brought back with him to Italy; the list of his oriental manuscripts, donated to the Vatican in 1718 by della Valle's heir Rinaldo de Bufalo, it was described as "a book on magic, translated from the Indian into the Persian language."[^3] This work is still preserved in the Vatican library.[^4] What was the origin of della Valle's text?

The title that he gave appears to be quite garbled.[^5] Nevertheless, it is possible to reconstruct the title of this text, from comparison of the six occurrences of the title in the manuscript with the description of another copy preserved in Islamabad: the original name must have been Kamru bijaksa , or The Kamarupa Seed Syllables .[^6] What is especially striking is that della Valle's copy appears to have been copied for his personal use in June 1622, two years before he arrived in India.

This copy was made in the southern Persian city of Lar, where della Valle lingered for some months, engaging in scientific discussion and theological polemics with Persian Shi`i scholars.[^7] In other words, this Persian treatise on yogic breathing and divination techniques was circulating independently in intellectual circles in Iran, from which della Valle learned of it and acquired a copy for himself. He was ready for the yogis before he arrived in India.