Dissertation

Ethics and Guile in a Series of Persian Rewritings of the Pañcatantra Fables

Schürch, Odile

2018

Overview

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.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Aesthetics / Ancient languages / Comparative literature / Ethics / Folklore / Islam / Islamic Studies / Panchatantra / Philosophy
• ISBN: 9798582578796