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"Panchatantra"
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The Prince’s Wings: Possible Origin of the Tale Type and its Early Chinese Variants
The article* aims to clarify the relations between the early versions of tale type ATU 575. Examining the range of Chinese accounts concerning various wooden birds, the author concludes that two groups can be distinguished. The first consists of stories about flying wooden kite-like birds that are not used as vehicles, while in the second, we deal with wooden birds that can carry people. Records belonging to the second group and evidently having their origin in Indian and Central Asian folk tradition appear later in China. An attempt is made to restore possible outlines of the tale type’s ancestral stories. The article states that the tale of an enamoured weaver in the Panchatantra evolves from the structure of such an ancestral story.
Journal Article
Retranslation in Mughal South Asia: The Impressive Failure of a Persian Panchatantra
This paper explores Muṣṭafá Khāliqdād ʿAbbāsī's 1590s Persian retranslation of the Panchatantra , commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar. Examining this text vis-à-vis other translations by Khāliqdād, other court-commissioned Sanskrit-Persian translations from Akbar's time, and the long Kalīla wa Dimna tradition in the Persianate world, this paper argues that retranslations, particularly unsuccessful ones, are where literary traditions and translation norms are most clearly negotiated and contested. Studying retranslations, as shown here, is a useful methodology for revealing tensions between different contemporaneous perspectives on what it takes to fully Persianize a text.
Journal Article
Anthropomorphism in Indian Visual Narratives
The study of images begins to flourish because of the ubiquity of visual representations in communication. A visual medium communicates across ages and languages. Each artifact, like strokes, colours and gestures, has its specific meaning that highlights human behaviour. In stories, animals in human form delight and capture the audiences’ attention. The selection of animals and their projected ways reflects more than what is expressed directly in the text. As a result, anthropomorphism (nonhuman entities that talk and act like human) is widely used as a communicative tool to insist on sensitive themes. Simultaneously, there is a belief that anthropomorphism misattributed human-like abilities to nonhuman which can risk the people’s approach towards nonhuman. This paper identifies some of the degrees of anthropomorphism noted in Indian visual narratives from Malik’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir, Gupta and Rastogi’s Chhotu: A Tale of Partition and Love, Amar Chitra Katha’s Animal Tales from India, Samhita Arni’s Sita’s Ramayana, Amruta Patil’s Aranyaka: Book of the Forest and Samit Basu’s Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma: Panchatantra. The study researches the role and importance of anthropomorphism in visual narratives.
Journal Article
A Comparative Study of the Earliest and the Latest English Translations of the Panchatantra
This thesis is a comparative study of the earliest and the latest English translation of an ancient collection of fables in Sanskrit called the Panchatantra. Thomas North translated the first English descendant of the Panchatantra, known as the Moral Philosophy of Doni, from Italian in 1570 C.E., and a recent English translation of the Panchatantra by Chandra Rajan appeared in 1997. This study aims to compare and contrast the structure and the content of the text in two translations that represent two different journeys from Sanskrit to English. The Moral Philosophy of Doni is an English translation of the Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of the Latin version of the Hebrew translation of an Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi translation of the Sanskrit text (Jacobs xi). Accordingly, North’s translation is linked to the Panchatantra through Kalila wa Dimna and is comparable to Rajan’s translation of Edgerton’s reconstruction of the lost Sanskrit text.
Dissertation
The Mindsweeper Tales: A Creative and Critical Approach to Reinventing the Medieval Framed Story-Collection as a Modern Novel
A widely used narrative form in medieval literature is the framed story-collection, where an external narrative frames a collection of interpolated tales. This practicebased PhD in Creative Writing addresses the absence of the medieval framed storycollection structure in modern literature through creative practice and critical enquiry. The project is comprised of two parts: the creative artefact, for which I have written a novel of roughly 100,000 words, and the accompanying critical exegesis of 30,000 words. By considering Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as a stylistic and structural model, I argue for the medieval framed story-collection structure’s continued relevance in contemporary fiction by demonstrating its potential for reinvention in the form of a modern novel. This thesis presents a methodological framework that can be practically applied to creative writing, consisting of six essential components to consider when modernising the medieval form: the frame, the tellers, the tales, dramatic interplay, stylistic variety, and themes. In my creative component, The Mindsweeper Tales, I demonstrate the application of these components by reinventing Chaucer’s pilgrimage in the form of a murder trial at the Old Bailey during the year 2030, in which the jurors become the narrators of the interpolated story collection. Further to this, I modernise Chaucer’s stylistic variety by engaging alternative narrative forms beyond traditional prose, such as Surrealist text collage and poetic interludes. Finally, I address the importance of socio-political themes in both Chaucer’s work and my own, demonstrating how the stylistic variety can be manipulated to represent the concerns of modern culture. This critical exegesis examines these Chaucerian elements alongside my creative piece to demonstrate how they have been reconceptualised in the form of amodern novel.
Dissertation
Nationalism, Genre and Childhood in Colonial Indian Children's Literature
Though Childhood Studies has been gradually diversifying, children’s literature of the Global South is still understudied. This has resulted in a normative understanding of the concept of ‘multiple childhoods,’ a concept that is gradually permeating the field in opposition to universalist global formulations of childhood which fail to account for both the history and the experiences of non-Western, marginalized childhoods. Postcolonial scholarship rarely addresses the role of children’s literature in nationalist discourses. Moreover, the pre-existing literature on colonial childhoods is dominated by historical and sociological analyses, relegating the role of the literary, a highly prominent public sphere in anti-colonial debates, to a peripheral position.My dissertation addresses this lacuna by arguing for the centrality of the literary and concept of childhood to the understanding of political autonomy in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial India and highlighting the primacy of age categories to colonial practices and postcolonial policies. It does so by approaching colonial childhood through the reception and consumption of nineteenth-century British literature and ideas of childhood in colonial India, and their impact on the production and publication of Indian children’s literature, with a focus on Bengali texts. My goal is to track the role of the literary in the creation and circulation of conversations about childhood within the juvenile periphery in India and to trace its political import within the Indian nationalists’ nascent visions of nationhood. My dissertation also demonstrates that within India, Bengal’s position as a forerunner in both nationalist politics and colonial education uniquely situates works of Bengali children’s literature as potent political artifacts and signifiers of contemporary visions of nationhood. Examining colonial children’s literature can lead to an epistemological alternative to “global, universal” ideals of childhood which originated in the 19th century in Europe. Ultimately, it radically challenges postcolonial scholarship’s neglect of the role children’s literature in nationalist discourses by demonstrating the processes by which the ontology of childhood determines transnational literary practices of colonialism and vice versa. Central to my argument lies the claim that analyzing conceptions of childhood is crucial to understanding the colonial enterprise. At the intersection of literary studies, colonial history, nationalist politics, and the history of the book, my project is positioned to investigate this claim.
Dissertation
Ethics and Guile in a Series of Persian Rewritings of the Pañcatantra Fables
In this thesis, I offer new insights into the study of the Pañcatantra cycle of stories of ancient Indian origin, through a focus on the tension between the Indian and the Islamic discourses on ethics and guile envisaged as complementary concepts. I choose to combine Genette's intertextual theory with Jauss's aesthetics of reception in order to better frame these two concepts of ethics and guile in their textual, psychological and socio-political contexts. Related to ethical awareness and guile, the literary and the psychological mechanisms of wonder (taʿajjub) will be studied. To this effect, I will show that wonder plays both a central and strategic role in the metaphorical usage of ethics and guile in order to convey political opinions, for its intrinsic links with the heart (qalb) and intellect or intelligence (ʿaql).The latter section of this thesis will illustrate the tension between ethics and guile in a close intertextual analysis of a few fables chosen in two of the Pañcatantra's Persian rewritings: Ḥusayn Vāʿiz-i Kāshifī's 15th-century Anvār-i Suhaylī, derived from Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's 8th-century Arabic version, and Khāliqdād ʿAbbāsī's 16th-century Pañcākhyāna, a direct translation of Pūrṇabhadra's Sanskrit text dated to the 12th century. I will demonstrate that the genre of \"Mirror for Princes\" is a pertinent choice to show how the tension between ethics and guile can be dissolved in those two parent versions and allows us to see what is to be expected to remain or not of this nīti secular tradition, still visible in ʿAbbāsī's Pañcākhyāna, in Kāshefī's Anvār, but also what might have filtered or not from Islamicate akhlāq tradition in ʿAbbāsī's text.
Dissertation