BN Goswamy

One Vishnusharman shrewdly gleaning

All worldly wisdom’s inner meaning:

In these five books, the charm compresses

Of all such books the world possesses.

— From Arthur Ryder’s 1925 translation of the Panchatantra

From among those who read a bit, there must be few, very few, who have not heard of the Panchatantra, that great repository of tales and fables, ‘certainly the most frequently translated literary product of India’, which goes a long, long way back into the past. Pandit Vishnu Sharma, a singularly gifted man at a court that one cannot identify for certain — was it in Kashmir, or South India? scholars have long wondered — belonging to a time which again one cannot be sure of — attributions range from a few centuries BCE to a few centuries CE — wrote this work in Sanskrit for three princes, sons of a king, Sudarshan by name.

To appreciate its structure and its raison, one might do well briefly to recall the background against which the work was composed. It is written that the princes, whose names figure in the text, were not especially bright but the king wanted them to be ‘taught’, counselled in the ways of the world. The task fell to Pandit Vishnu Sharma, who, sensing that the princes might not respond to straightforward lessons in politics and diplomacy and relationships and administration, devised — brilliantly, one might add — the method of communicating valuable lessons in the form of simple stories in which animals figured more often than men: animals, however, who could think and speak and act in the manner in which humans do.

Vishnu Sharma organised all the stories in five sections he called tantras or strands — that is where the name Panchatantra comes from — each of which bore a meaningful name: thus, mitra-bheda, meaning ‘the loss of friends’ or ‘on causing dissension among allies’; mitra-laabha, meaning ‘the winning of friends’ or ‘on securing allies’; kaakolukiyam, meaning literally ‘on crows and owls’ but in fact ‘on war and peace’; labdhapranaasham, meaning ‘loss of gains’, or ‘on losing what you have gained’; and, finally, aparikshitkaarakam, meaning ‘ill-considered action’, or ‘on imprudence’. “In a forest was a lake in which”, a story might begin, “an old stork lived with all aquatic creatures”. Another might open thus: “There was, in those times, a lion called Irontooth and his two courtiers who lived in the same forest. The lion was always in the company of a jackal named Clever …” But whichever tantra any of these stories related to, they remained laced with wit and wisdom, rich in warmth and woven with understanding. And there was at the end of each a lesson, a moral: easy to take in, delicious to roll over the tongue.

The fame of the Panchatantra has not been tarnished by passing time, nor has it lost its lustre even in the barest. There is a version of the text in nearly every major language of India, as Franklin Edgerton noted, and “in addition there are 200 versions of the text in more than 50 languages around the world.” It is the travels of this simple but great text, however, that are astonishing. Whatever the date of its composition, it is known that it reached the world outside of India as early as the 6th century when the Sassanian emperor, Khusrau Noshirwan, secured a copy of it through a physician of his who went to India. The Sanskrit text was translated into Pahlavi which became the basis of its further translation into different languages in the East. There was delight in the tales and morality at the base of each of them, it was quickly realised. In the Islamic world the trend of translating it began in the 8th century when from the Pahlavi it was translated into Arabic under the orders of the second Caliph of Baghdad, and given the title Kalila-wa Dimnah after the names of two jackals with whom the stories began. From Arabic it went into Persian at the court of that great patron of learning, Sultan Husain Mirza at Herat. The year was 1504, and the title it was given was Anvar-i Suhayli: ‘The Lights of Canopus’ in other words. Canopus being the second brightest star in the entire firmament, the reference in the new name of the text was almost certainly to the light of wisdom that emanated from it. While this was happening in the east, the text had reached Europe too through a translation by a Jewish priest. It was among the early books printed at the very first printing press set up by Gutenberg. Edgerton goes on to add that “…before 1600 it existed in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Old Slavonic, Czech, and perhaps other Slavonic languages. Its range has extended from Java to Iceland...” Back at home, it caught the fancy of the Mughal emperor, Akbar, much as that other great book of stories, the Hamzanama, had. The Anvar-i Suhayli was copied, recited from, and painted, one of the earliest Mughal versions having been produced somewhere close to 1575.

I need perhaps to explain here why I have, suddenly, turned to speaking of the Panchatantra. I was in Mumbai, just a couple of weeks back, at the city’s premier museum, the great CSMVS, formerly the Prince of Wales Museum, and was being taken around by its director, Sabyasachi Mukerjee, to see yet another wonderful thing he has done: building a brand new creative space for children. Due to open soon, it is not a conventional ‘Children’s Museum’, filled with ‘Child Art’, but a learning, liberating, space where children will soon be doing their own things. There, in one of the small rooms, lay a slim little book, a publication of the Museum, titled the Anvar-i Suhayli which I was drawn to. For, I found as I leafed through it, not only did it draw attention to an Akbari manuscript which the museum now owns, but also a wonderful section showing how the manuscript, which was in relatively poor condition, was treated and restored, in the workshop of the Museum, under the eyes of Vandana Prapanna, the curator, and Anupam Sah, the art conservator. It represented a great effort, and I thought it needed to be spoken about. Am I right?