| Sumario: | This paper uses a singular, purportedly South Asian illustrated manuscript of the Tarih-i Hind-i garbi (History of the India of the West), now in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, to explore how artists in seventeenth-century South Asia may have rendered the history of the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica. Although the earlier, Ottoman versions of this text are better known, the manuscript under study has been attributed by past scholars to India's southern Deccan region. Part of the aim of this article is to provide textual and visual support for this attribution. Moreover, this article traces specific word choices, selective omissions, and written insertions within the Chester Beatty Library's manuscript of the Tarih-i Hind-i garbi that together transform the story of the conquest of Mesoamerica and further distinguish it from Francisco López de Gómara's 1552 account, from whose Spanish-language text (and its Italian renditions) the translation is adapted. The most elaborate painting in the Chester Beatty Library's manuscript depicts a scene of Moteuczoma visiting his temple. The imprisoned Mesoamerican ruler has been rendered in a European painting style using a symbolic South Asian composition. These textual and visual choices constitute a 'motivated mistranslation' that disrupts Gómara's defense of the conquest as a narrative of holy Christian conquest, equates Christian and Mesoamerican religious practices, and places the regal Moteuczoma, instead of the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, at the center of the narrative.
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