Panchatantra
பஞ்சதந்திரம் पञ्चतन्त्रम्
Also Kalila wa Dimna, The Fables of Bidpai, Hitopadesha as its descendant.
Poetry Sanskrit Probably about the third century, from older material
What it is
The Panchatantra is a set of animal fables assembled as a course in practical politics for three dull princes, whom a teacher undertakes to make wise in six months. It is not a children’s book and is not moral in the usual sense: it teaches how to keep allies, detect enemies, read a situation and survive a court, and it is frequently cynical. It is probably the most widely travelled book ever written in India, reaching Europe through Pahlavi, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin, and standing behind La Fontaine and a good deal of European fable.
Its shape
Five tantras, books: Mitra Bheda, the splitting of friends; Mitra Labha, the winning of friends; Kakolukiyam, on crows and owls, which is about war; Labdhapranasam, on losing what you have gained; and Apariksitakarakam, on acting without thinking. Each is a frame story with tales nested inside it, sometimes three or four deep, and verses of counsel punctuate the prose. The surviving recensions differ a great deal and no original text survives.
What it argues about
These are not settled texts
The book is about power and it does not pretend to be about virtue. The first and longest book is a sustained account of how a jackal destroys a friendship between a lion and a bull by lying to both, and he succeeds, and the bull dies. Readers from the colonial period onward have been uneasy about a classic that teaches manipulation to princes, and the usual defence is that it describes a world rather than recommending it. The honest reading is that it is a manual: the frame says explicitly that the point is to make the princes capable of governing, and what it teaches them is how courts actually work.
Episodes worth knowing
The lion and the bull
A lion and a bull became friends, which left the lion’s two jackal ministers with nothing. Damanaka, the cleverer, went to each separately and told each that the other was planning to kill him, adjusting the story to the hearer. Both believed it, met warily, fought, and the bull was killed. The lion then grieved, and Damanaka consoled him with arguments about the necessity of what had happened. There is no punishment and no correction. The longest book of the Panchatantra is an account of a successful piece of court intrigue told from the intriguer’s point of view.
How it got to Europe
A Persian physician, Burzoe, was sent to India in the sixth century and brought the text back; it was translated into Pahlavi, then into Arabic by Ibn al Muqaffa as Kalila wa Dimna, then into Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and from the Latin into most European languages, reaching English in the sixteenth century. La Fontaine acknowledged in his second collection that he owed much to an Indian sage. Few books have been translated more often, and in each language it was taken for a local classic.
Whose telling
There is no single text
- Purnabhadra, 1199
- The Jain recension, the fullest and the one most modern Sanskrit editions follow.
- Kalila wa Dimna
- Ibn al Muqaffa’s eighth century Arabic version from the Pahlavi, which carried the book across the Islamic world and into Europe.
- Hitopadesha
- Narayana’s later Bengali Sanskrit reworking, four books, which draws on the Panchatantra and is more widely taught in India today.
- Tamil and other Indian versions
- The Tamil Panchatantra and versions in most Indian languages, often with local animals and local court detail substituted.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- North India
- Taught in Sanskrit schools, and the Hitopadesha rather than the Panchatantra is the version most often set for students.
- Tamil Nadu
- The Tamil Panchatantra is an old translation and the stories are standard school material.
- Bengal
- Narayana’s Hitopadesha is from Bengal, and the tradition of illustrated fable manuscripts is strong.
- Kashmir
- The Kashmiri recension is one of the main branches used to reconstruct the lost original.
Connected to
Arts