Journey
Stories that travelled out of India
India's largest export before cotton was narrative. Seven collections here, and what happened to each of them: a book of fables that reached French through six languages, a Buddha who became a canonised Catholic saint, a war game that became chess, a race game that became Ludo, and a parrot whose stories occasioned the first datable Mughal painting.
Stops (16)
- Pañcatantra · c. 200 BCE – 300 CE
Five books of animal fables inside a frame, attributed to Vishnu Sharma and written to teach statecraft to three dull princes in six months. Some two hundred versions exist in about sixty languages, which makes it the most widely translated secular work ever produced in India. The Sanskrit original is lost and what survives are recensions.
- Burzōe · c. 550 CE
Khosrow I's court physician, sent to India to obtain the Panchatantra and put it into Middle Persian. His Pahlavi text is lost, and every European descendant of the book runs back through it. His own preface survives inside the Arabic version: an account of becoming a physician and of looking for a teaching that would outlast a cure.
- Kalīla wa Dimna · 750 CE onward
Ibn al-Muqaffa's Arabic version, made at Basra and named for the two jackals of its first book. From here the chain runs to Hebrew, to John of Capua's Latin about 1270, and on into German, Italian and Spanish; and separately through the Persian Anvar-i Suhayli to Les Fables de Pilpay in French in 1644.
- Ctesiphon · the Sasanian court
Ctesiphon, where Khosrow I kept the physician he sent to India and where the Pahlavi translation was made. The Sasanian court is the single bottleneck in this transmission: Greek medicine, Indian fable and Indian mathematics all passed through it westward, and the Arabic world inherited the whole library at once.
- The Jātakas · c. 300 BCE – 500 CE
Five hundred and forty-seven stories of the Buddha's previous births, most of them older folk tales with a Buddhist frame attached. A good number have close Aesopic parallels, and which way the borrowing ran has been argued since the nineteenth century without resolution. Many are carved at Bharhut and Sanchi, which dates them independently of any manuscript.
- Barlaam and Josaphat · by the 11th century
The Christian legend of an Indian prince shielded from all knowledge of suffering, who sees an old man, a sick man and a corpse, renounces his kingdom and is converted by a hermit. It is the life of the Buddha, and both prince and hermit were canonised, with a feast day in the Roman Martyrology on 27 August.
- Chaturaṅga / Chess · by the 6th century
Chaturanga, a four-armed battle game of infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots with a king and a counsellor, played in India by the sixth century. It went to Persia as chatrang, to the Arabs as shatranj, and into Europe as chess, and the pieces changed identity in transit because nobody knew what an elephant was doing on a board.
- Pachīsī / Ludo · Ludo, 1896
Pachisi, a race for four round a cross-shaped board, moved by throws of cowrie shells and named for twenty-five, the highest throw. Akbar is remembered playing it on courtyards with women of the harem as the pieces. It reached England as Ludo in 1896, with a single die in place of the cowries, and America as Parcheesi — the second Indian board game, after chaturanga, that the world plays under another name.
- Śukasaptati and the Tūtīnāma · c. 1100 · Persian 14th c.
Seventy tales told by a parrot to keep a merchant's wife at home each night, each running until dawn. Nakhshabi turned it into the Persian Tutinama, and Akbar had an illustrated copy made whose two hundred and fifty miniatures are the first securely datable body of Mughal painting — a Sanskrit parrot occasioning a school of art.
- Kathāsaritsāgara · c. 1070, Kashmir
Somadeva's ocean of the streams of story, twenty-one thousand verses composed for Queen Suryamati and drawn from the lost Brihatkatha of Gunadhya. It is the largest frame-story collection in any language, with frames nested six and seven deep — the structure the Arabian Nights and the Decameron also use. Tawney and Penzer's English edition runs to ten volumes.
- Vetālapañcaviṃśati · c. 1000–1200
Twenty-five tales told by a vetala to King Vikramaditya, each ending in a dilemma the king must judge and each judgement costing him the corpse he is carrying. It circulates inside the Kathasaritsagara, as an independent Sanskrit text, as the Hindi Baital Pachisi, and as Richard Burton's Vikram and the Vampire of 1870.
- Kalhaṇa · 1148–49
Kalhana wrote the Rajatarangini in Kashmir within eighty years of Somadeva composing the Kathasaritsagara there, for the same court. Eleventh and twelfth-century Kashmir produced both the only sustained Sanskrit history and the largest Sanskrit story collection, which is not a coincidence: it is one literary establishment doing two things.
- Tirukkuṛaḷ · seven words a couplet
One thousand three hundred and thirty Tamil couplets on virtue, wealth and love, attributed to Valluvar, naming no god, no country and no king — which is why Hindus, Jains, Jesuits and Dravidianists have all been able to claim it. That silence is what let it travel: G. U. Pope's translation put it into English in 1886, and from there it reached a Russian who was looking for exactly such a text.
- Leo Tolstoy · 1908, twenty-nine drafts
Tolstoy wove Kural verses through “A Letter to a Hindu”, the six-thousand-word answer he wrote to Tarak Nath Das, who had asked him to bless armed Indian independence. He refused and argued for the law of love instead. Gandhi read it in 1909, asked permission to reprint it in Indian Opinion, translated it into Gujarati himself, and corresponded with Tolstoy until his death — so an ancient Tamil ethics reached a Gujarati in Johannesburg through a Russian in Tula, and came back as satyagraha.
- Córdoba · 10th century onward
Cordoba, where Arabic translation carried Indian material into Latin Europe — the decimal numerals, al-Khwarizmi's arithmetic, and the fables. Almost everything Indian that reached medieval Europe came through an Arabic intermediary and arrived without an Indian name attached to it.
- Rome · and to Rome
Barlaam and Josaphat entered the Roman Martyrology and the Golden Legend, and churches were dedicated to Josaphat in Palermo and in Venice. The Buddha's life became a Catholic hagiography by way of Manichaean Persian, Arabic, Georgian and Greek, with nobody along the route knowing whose biography they were copying.