The Panchatantra
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #14
My adventures in the land of fables have led me into the Himalyas, to Kasmir, and to the Panchatantra, a text first compiled in 350-400 CE by Vishnusharma, an octogenarian Brahmin.
I did not literally venture into the mountains to retrieve this ancient literature, of course. I did no more than scale the digital foothills of the internet, where I gathered some background information and start to read two translations of the work. It was then my unarduous journey ground to a halt as I struggled to get through them.
Too Old, Too Rarified
The first and longest part of the Panchatantra describes the intrigues of the jackal Damanaka as he seeks to secure his position in the court of a lion. It’s all talk, as you migh expect: highly-mannered discourses between courtier and king follow on from debates between the jackal and his principled friend Karataka, to whom he reveals his stratagems.
Damanaka is a villain, a liar, who plays one side against another with no concern for anyone’s well-being but his own. His machinations are presented as a caution to princes and rulers who depend on advice, but lessons for us common folk are limited.
The fables appear as part of the dialogue, employed by the characters to illustrate their arguments, as fictional examples cited to warn of adverse outcomes. This is where most of the action is, and where the thrill of complex narration begins, as the stories become nested within each other, but it is the framing story that dominates and it moves too slowly for my taste.
Too Young, Too Simple
So I abandoned the trip and returned home, so to speak. Or rather I leapt forward fifteen hundred years to early last century, when Maude Barrows Dutton published a collection of fables drawn from the same source (probably after Jean de la Fontaine’s collection, who also credited to an Indian sage, ‘Bilpai,’ as author of the original). Now the fables had been chiselled from the ancient text and reformed in the domestic language of the hearth or the bedside, the complexity so much debris on the floor.
But then I discovered the text’s cross-cultural migrations.
The Migrant Text
The Panchatantra had travelled west crossing borders under assumed names in new languages, from Pahlavi to Arabic, Greek, and Spanish, where it became ‘Calila and Dimna’ (the new names for the jackals Damanaka and Karataka). Along the way, it had lost the obscure references and some of the formality, but gained a leaner, more supple form and finally I was able to appreciate it.
I made it through all five discourses (tantras): from the surprisingly upbeat and constructive second ‘book’ in which four creatures become friends and work together to keep each other from harm, which features some robust debate on trust and enmity and mutual interest, to the shocking conclusion of the war between the owls and the crows, which sometimes contradicts the wisdom of the former.
And now some of the fables have fetched up in new versions (by me) here: ‘The Lion and the Hares’ and ‘The Tortoise and the Geese.’
