Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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first English translation was done in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas North – he who translated Plutarch into a work which was the source of Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Roman world. North’s Plutarch was popular reading: so was his version of Bidpai. In the introduction to the reissue of this translation in the nineteenth century, Joseph Jacobs of Cambridge (Jews have been prominent in the movement and adaptation of the book) concludes: ‘If I go on further, I foresee a sort of mental dialogue which will pass between my reader and myself: “What,” the reader will exclaim, “the first literary link between India and England, between Buddhism and Christendom, written in racy English with vivacious dialogue and something resembling a plot. Why, you will be trying to make us believe that you have restored to us an English Classic!” “Exactly so,” I should be constrained to reply, and lest I be tempted into this temerity, I will even make a stop here.’
And he did stop, but by then he had written a very great number of pages. I have been handed over by Ramsay Wood a vast heap of many versions of the Fables of Bidpai – some of them rare and precious – to aid me in this task of doing an introduction, and the first thing to be noticed is that the introductions tend to be very long: it is clear that the authors of them have become beguiled and besotted with the book’s history. As I have. For one thing, it has lasted at least two thousand years. But it is hard to say where the beginning was – suitably for a book whose nature it is to accommodate tales within tales and to blur the margins between historical fact and fiction.
One progenitor was the Buddhist cycle of Birth Tales (or Jātaka Stories) where the Buddha appears as a monkey, deer, lion, and so on. Several of the Bidpai tales came from this cycle. Incidents that occur in Bidpai can be seen in sculptures around Buddhist shrines dated before 200bc. The Buddha himself took some of the Birth Tales from earlier folktales about animals. But there is no race or nation from the Egyptians on – or back, for we may surely no longer assume that current information regarding ancient history is all there is to be known, or all that we will come to know – that has not used beast-fables as part of its heritage of instructional material. And so the genre is as ancient as mankind itself. Sir Richard Burton, who like all the other orientalists of the nineteenth century was involved with Bidpai, suggested that man’s use of the beast-fable commemorates our instinctive knowledge of how we emerged from the animal kingdom, on two legs but still with claws and fangs.
Another source or contributor was that extraordinary book, the Arthaṡāstra of Kautilya, which is suspected of dating from about 300 bc. It is not easy to lay one’s hands on a copy, and this is a pity: at a time when we are all, down to the least citizen, absorbed, not to say obsessed, with sociology and the arts of proper government, this book should take its place, not as the earliest manual on the subject, but as the earliest we know of. It describes in exact and even pernickety detail how properly to run a kingdom, from the kind of goods that should be available in the market-place to the choice of kingly advisers; how one should go about creating a new village, and where; the right way to employ artisans to manufacture gold and silver coins; disputes between neighbours about property and boundaries; how to keep accounts; the legal system; the use of spies. It is all here. And to our minds, what a mixture of humanity and brutality! It was forbidden, for instance, to have sex with a woman against her will, even if she was a prostitute, but there are also lengthy instructions about the use of torture as a punishment. Kautilya was a very cool one indeed; surely this book must have influenced Machiavelli when he wrote The Prince. If not, then the books come from the same region of human experience. Candid, unrhetorical, infinitely worldly-wise, the tone is more like that which one imagines must exist, let’s say, between a Begin and a Sadat when sitting together facing the realities of a situation unobserved by slogan-chanting supporters, or between a Churchill and a Roosevelt meeting in the middle of a war. There is nothing in the Arthaṡāstras that minimises the harshness of necessary choices. It was by no means the first of such handy guides to statesmanship, for Kautilya says it is a compendium of ‘almost all the Arthaṡāstras which in view of acquisition and maintenance of the earth have been composed by ancient teachers’. In other words, this to us so ancient book was to him the last in a long line of instructive tracts, stretching back into antiquity. Throughout he quotes the view of this one or that, sometimes up to ten or more, and then adds at the end, ‘My teacher says …’ but usually disagrees with them all, including his teacher, with ‘No, says Kautilya …’ or ‘Not so, says Kautilya …’, setting everything and everyone right, so that the book has about it the air of a young man refusing to be impressed by tradition – rather like students in the sixties bringing their own books to class and insisting on choosing their own curriculum.
The cycle called The Fables of Bidpai came into existence in this manner … but let us choose a version that, typically, tries to set fiction on a base of fact. Alexander the Great, having conquered India, set a disliked and unjust governor over the vanquished ones, who were at last able to overturn this tyrant, and chose a ruler of their own. This was King Dabschelim, but he turned out to be no better than his predecessor. A wise and incorruptible sage named Bidpai, knowing that he risked his life, went to the no-good king to tell him that the heavens were displeased with him because of his depredations, his cruelties, his refusal to be properly responsible for the welfare of the people put in his care. And sure enough, Bidpai found himself cast into the deepest and foulest dungeon; but the king, attracting to himself heavenly influences because of his inner disquiet over this behaviour of his, was caused to think again and … Thereafter the tale unfolds in the characteristic way of the genre, stories within stories, one leading to another. We in the West do not have this kind of literature, except where it has come to us through influences from the East: Boccaccio and Chaucer, for instance. What this method of storytelling, or this design, is supposed to illustrate is the way that in life one thing leads to another, often unexpectedly, and that one may not make neat and tidy containers for ideas and events – or hopes and possibilities – and that it is not easy to decide where anything begins or ends. As the history of the book itself proves. When the ‘frame’ story stops, temporarily, and a cluster of related tales is told, what is happening is that many facets of a situation are being illuminated, before the movement of the main story goes on. There may be even more than one ‘frame’ story, so that we are led gently into realm after realm, doors opening as if one were to push a mirror and find it a door.
Another version of the book’s origin is that there was once a good and honest king who had three stupid and lazy sons. Many educational experts came forward with suggestions as to their proper instruction, but the king was in despair, knowing that to give them the foundation of information they needed would take years, by which time the kingdom would be ruined. And then came a sage who said he would impart to the three princes the essence of statesmanship and sensible conduct in the form of instructive fables, and the process would be accomplished in a very short time, if the princes could be persuaded to pay attention. Thus the book has been known as A Mirror for Princes, and we are told that it was given to princes as part of their training to be monarchs.
The original Sanskrit version vanished, though later the material was translated back into Sanskrit from other languages, and India has produced as many versions ‘as there are stars in the sky’. The ancient Persian King of Kings, Nushirvan, heard of the book, and sent embassies, and it was translated into the ancient Persian tongue of Pahlavi, which event was thought of such importance that Firdausi celebrated it in the Shahnama. The incidents of the tales were infinitely illustrated in this book and in very many others, and anyone at all interested in Persian art will certainly have come across them in miniatures and otherwise. Not only Persian art – I have here a postcard from the British Museum of a turtle being carried through the air on a stick by two geese: the friends who could not bear to be parted. It is from a Turkish manuscript. The British Museum has this and many other ancient manuscripts so precious one may view them only through glass, like jewels, which they resemble.
When the Arabs conquered the old world, after the death of Muhammad, poets and scholars arrived in India, enquiring for the famous book they had heard so much about. The way they tracked it down, like the account of how the old Persian envoys found their copy, makes an attractive story full of suspense, mystery and drama, so that one has to suspect that the storytellers of the time took their opportunity to honour even further this honoured