The two intriguing appellations that appear in the title, ‘The Horribly Howling’ and ‘The Victor,’ are the translations of the original Sanskrit names of two jackals, Kartaka and Damnaka. These two animals are the never-forgotten characters of the fable Panchatantra, a string of five sets of tales that we have inherited from ancient India. This Sanskrit fable has had a glowing, continuous, and historically unique career in world literature. Believed to have been written in the third century BCE by one Vishnu Sharma and narrated by a real or fabricated sage Bidpai, this work is recognised as the most frequently translated literary product of India. Here is a literary seed from whose inner generative principle have sprouted forth many adaptations, appropriations, re-configurations, back-formations, and new stories — and this in so many languages of human societies all over the globe. Its shadows are to be found in China and Java, and in Europe and Iran, and, indeed, in the Semitic world of Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic. Note also that Panchatantra, containing both verse and prose, appears to be the pioneer of what is called the frame-story format, stories leading to stories, like those Russain dolls nested and framed within dolls, a format familiar to us from the Alf Laila wa Laila tradition.

Panchatantra’s historical vicissitudes over more than 2,000 years are instructive. Here we see once again that in the creative world of art and poetry and ideas, political boundaries blur, eventually sinking into dark nothingness; and the barbed wires found on territorial borders soften, taking up the character of silk, as Iqbal would have it, or, as Faiz resolved to bring about, they begin to sing like the lyre and the harp. The creative world does not recognise the East and the West it seems; it has its own logic and its own grammar. In the cross-cultural transmission of literary forms and themes, even of local narratives, all of which arise in the world of creative imagination, the whole of humanity seems to be a single organic body, often integrated and unified in its search, its longings and yearnings. Indeed, nature did not create ‘nation-sates,’ we did.

A legend narrated in the famous Shahnama of Firdausi has it that a physician of the Sassanid king Anushirvan once heard of a mountain herb possessing the unique efficacy of bringing the dead back to life, and that this herb was to be found in Hindustan. Naturally, the loyal physician immediately sought his king’s permission to travel East and acquire this wonder drug for the royal Persian materia medica. The permission was granted, but the physician never returned with any mountain herb; rather, he brought with him the Kalila (Panchatantra). Yes, a sage had taught him that the wonder drug in search of which he had reached Hindustan is none other than knowledge. And here we enter into the world of a profound allegory of the Shahnama: knowledge was the mountain, forever inaccessible to the common lot. The lifeless corpse was the uninstructed, unguided individual. Dispense knowledge to this corpse, and it shall attain life. This knowledge was contained in the Sanskrit fable to which the sage now pointed. And so, with the aid of some Hindu pundits, the king’s physician translates this text into Pahlavi.

Entangled with many other legends, this Firdausi legend is not without historical ground. For we know as an established fact that in 570 CE, a Persian physician of the Sassanid Empire, named Borzuya, did indeed translate the Panchatantra into Pahlavi, the language also called Middle Persian. It was this Pahlavi rendering that became the basis of the resounding Kalila wa Dimna, the Arabic version by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ that appeared in 750. This was the time of the fall of the Umayyad dynasty and the culmination of the Abbasid revolution. Note that Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ was a Persian Muslim convert of Zoroastrian origin, a superb writer, translator, and philosopher, who was mercilessly executed by the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur around 756, and this owing to a messy melee of politico-religious intrigue. Borzuya’s Pahlavi text was also translated into Syriac, another ancient Semitic language, but this rendering seems to have a limited role in the subsequent history of the fable.

Re-cast into the Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, the magnitude of the fable’s fortunes seems unsurpassed, in fact unmatched, in the entire history of world literature, and it is for this reason that I justify my use of the adjective “resounding” for it. But then, the journey of this Panchatantra Arabic text also opens many vistas into the history of world culture. Indeed, I have often observed in my writings that, when viewed in the wider context of global history, Islamic / Islamicate / Muslim culture would emerge as having played a decisive role of cultural synthesis. This grand synthesis combines, assimilates, integrates, and sometimes jettisons after full use the cultures of the classical world — Greek, Persian, and Indian among them. From the synthesising culture, the human world received a multicoloured bouquet of history — a bouquet that is passed on, eventually, to the Latin West. To seek the aid of another metaphor, this synthesis has now been running like a gushing stream into what we call the modern world.

It is to be pointed out that practically all pre-modern European translations of Panchatantra are from the Arabic version — that is, from the Kalila wa Dimna of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘; radiating forth through Arabic, the re-configured Sanskrit original now known by the names of two of its main animal characters. There was a Greek translation already in existence in the 11th century. Then, by the next century Rabbi Joel translated the Kalila into Hebrew, and this happened in al-Andalus, the European Muslim post. From the Hebrew we get the redoubtable Latin translation of John of Capua in 1480, this one bearing the title The Directory of Human Life — note here the meaningful irony that is hidden in the title of a network of stories not about human beings but about animals. Many European versions thereafter are based on this Arabic-into-Hebrew-into-Latin text. A German translation was produced in 1483, being one of the earliest books to be printed by Gutenberg’s Press after the Bible. The Latin translation was also the source of an Italian rendering in 1552; the same Latin having yielded the 1570 English version of Sir Thomas North’s as The Fables of Bidpai or the Morall Philosophie of Doni. More than a century later, we received Jean de La Fontaine’s famous French version of 1679.

With full justification, the version by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ has been described as “the pivotal surviving text that enriched world literature”: of course, all one has to do is look under Kalila wa Dimna in the index of Robert Irwin’s Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (London: Penguin Books, 2006). In fact, just as the Panchatantra was worked over and over again in India and was re-translated into its source language Sanskrit, so was the Kalila wa Dimna — while having itself arisen from (Middle) Persian, it was re-translated into (classical) Persian in the 12th century. Then we have yet another ramification of the Kalila — this is the 15th century Anvar-e Sohayli (Lights of the Canopus) of Husain Wa‘iz Kashifi, the monumental author also of the very well-known Rauzat al-Shuhada’ (The Garden of the Martyrs) which until this day provides to the Shia majlis detailed material relating to the afflictions of Ahl al-Bait (the people of the Prophet’s (pbuh) family) in the Karbala tragedy.

I have been referring to the Kalila wa Dimna as the Arabic ‘version’ of the Panchatantra rather than a translation, and this for good reasons. Certainly, it is more than a direct Arabic rendering, for it modifies the original, adapts Sanskrit characters to appeal to the local Perso-Arabic cultural taste, makes additions, and does some non-trivial re-casting. For example, according to the original Sanskrit narrative, the tales illustrate for the guidance of three frivolous princes a Hindu principle — that of niti (“the wise conduct of life”), narrated by the sage Pidpai. Then, the author Vishnu Sharma makes an appearance and narrates the rest of the book to the three hitherto ignorant princes.

Now Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ changed the introduction and the frame story of the first book. The Arabic version inserts a new initial introduction, explaining how the book was first written when Dhu’l-Qarnain (‘The One with Two Horns,’ as the reference to Alexander the Great is made in the Quran) was attempting to invade India. An Indian king, remorseful of past misdeeds, asks a sage Baidaba (Pidpai) to compose a book of wisdom stories for the instruction of future generations. Held as a treasure, the book is stored in a great vault in a castle, jealously guarded. A great Persian Emperor hears of the wisdom text and sends one of his faithful servants to acquire it. This emissary has to spend years in the castle before he is able to win the trust of the custodians and gain access to the treasure. He then returns with it to Persia. None of this exists in the original Panchatantra.

True to its name, the Panchatantra — literally meaning “five principles” — contains five nested tales. But Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ interposed a new tale between the first and the second, taking the total number to six. This new tale, ‘Truth will be Revealed Sooner or Later,’ tells us about Dimna’s trial. The jackal is charged with the crime of instigating the murder of the bull Shanzaba, a central character in the first story. The trial lasts for two days without any verdict — and then, a tiger and a leopard make an appearance, bearing witness against Dimna. Dimna is put to death. Again, there is no parallel to this story in the original Sanskrit. Was Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ expressing political views allegorically? We have reasons to believe that this was indeed the case, and the political theorist of our own times, Jennifer London, strongly agrees with this observation. Recall that some years later after completing the Kalila, the literary giant who composed it was himself put to death by the Abbasids. Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ also changes characterisations of some animals in order to place them in a familiar milieu; the Brahmin is “the hermit” in the Arabic.

The radiation of a Sanskrit work through the fountainhead of Arabic has reached so very far. Its influences are to be found even in the famous Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Rasa’il Ikwan al-Safa’), an anonymous encyclopedia of philosophy, science, wisdom, and morals compiled in the 10th century by a secret fraternity with Shia-Ismaili inclinations. To begin with, the very name of the group, Ikhwan al-Safa’, itself comes from the Kalila. Then this work of 52 +1 epistles has one epistle, the 22nd, which is an animal fable, having unmistakable parallels with the added story of Dimna’s trial in the Kalila. This epistle has recently seen a rigorous critical edition and translation carried out by Lenn Goodman and Richard McGregor, namely, The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Intriguingly, this epistle was a required reading for young civil servants in India during the British Raj. It was translated by Moulavi Ikram Ali around 1859 and published by Calcutta’s famous Fort William College. Then, the grand compiler of what rules until this day as one of the most reliable, if not the most reliable, Urdu-English dictionary, John Platts too published an Urdu translation of the Ikhwan’s epistle, but based on Ikram Ali’s work. Other Urdu translations have been popping up here and there.

We see that the Panchatantra still lives, both independently as well as through the Kalila wa Dimna. Explicitly or implicitly it has influenced many contemporary writers, and it was not so long ago that Ramsay Wood told the tale yet anew, so we have the book Kalila wa Dimna: the Panchatantra Retold, a work claiming to have based itself not only from the original Sanskrit text but also its translations and transfigurations in Persian, Arabic, and English (Delhi: Random House, 2010). In her introduction to Wood’s retelling in an earlier version of 1982, Doris Lessing wrote: “Until comparatively recently, anyone with any claim to a literary education knew that the Fables of Bidpai or the Tales of Kalila and Dimna was a great Eastern classic. There were at least 20 English translations before 1888.” Yes, cross-cultural borders and territorial lines indeed sing welcoming songs for the fable, like the harp and the lyre.