The Hitopadesha-which literally means good advice-was composed in Sanskrit sometime between the ninth and tenth centuries CE by Pandit Narayana. Arranged in four fascinating sections Winning Friends, Losing Friends, Waging War, and Making Peace-the vignettes that comprise the text include tales of anthropomorphized birds and animals who are imbued with all too human qualities and frailties.
Using humour, satire, and unconventional methods of narration, the stories in the collection prescribe canny and pragmatic responses to a range of very human situations, ambitions, problems, and dilemmas.
Not only does the book have advice for the ruler who is too timid or too haughty, but also for the minister who must serve him, as for the innocent husband with the conniving wife, the beautiful wife with the undeserving husband, friends turned enemies, enemies reconciled, clever people, foolish people, the greedy, the distraught, and so on.
The Hitopadesha, like the Panchatantra, is among the most widely translated classical texts of India. This new version by historian and Sanskritist Shonaleeka Kaul is an idiomatic translation in simple narrative prose and free verse that retains the freshness and wit of the original.
Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural and intellectual historian of early India, specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is a professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has also been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University, USA, the Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and DAAD Professor of History at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. She has authored, edited, or translated seven books based on classical and vernacular Indian literature.
'Hitopadesha' literally means 'good advice. The ancient Sanskrit text of that name, which is translated here into English for modern readers, is an epigrammatic text in mixed prose and verse that brings together good advice, drawing on a popular theme or genre of thought and literature in early India known as niti. Niti is usually translated as 'principles of polity and/ or morality'. But, as readers will see, niti as represented in a collection of stories like the Hitopadesha went well beyond the political and the moral to embrace the simply practical. Prescribing canny and pragmatic responses to a range of very human situations, ambitions, problems, and dilemmas, niti, as invoked repeatedly in the Hitopadesha, is really the knowledge and art of prudent conduct. And the text disseminates this knowledge in the form of illustrative stories, fables, and maxims involving the lives of humans and animals.
The Hitopadesha was probably composed in the ninth or tenth century CE, and scholars conjecture that it may have been produced in some part of eastern India where a number (though not all) of its manuscripts were discovered in the nineteenth century. As the colophons of the text tell us, it was composed by a scholar called Pandit Narayana and sponsored and promoted by a medieval Indian ruler called Dhavalachandra, whose role the poet acknowledges briefly at the end of his composition. Beyond this, however, as is common for much of Sanskrit literature, we do not know anything about the author and his context.
Initially, in fact, before the particular manuscript carrying Narayana's name was found, it was not known that any such person was the composer of this work. The Hitopadesha was credited instead by scholars and early translators to Vishnusharma, the sage who figures in the text and narrates all its stories. Vishnusharma is also known to be the composer of that other world-famous Sanskrit fable, the Panchatantra, and since there was a great deal in common between the Hitopadesha and the Panchatantra, it was assumed that they had one and the same authorship. Now we know that is not the case.
However, the question of the authorship of the Hitopadesha remains complicated because of the nature of the text. Rather than an original work from start to finish, it is for the most part an anthology or collection of verses, perspectives, and teachings from a host of other seminal Sanskrit texts of the Indic civilization.
Anthologizing in this manner was not unheard of in early India and other examples of texts have come down to us that preserve what were obviously considered in their time important as well as elegantly turned verses or entire stories from multiple compositions across ages. These include the Subhashitaratnakosha in Sanskrit (eleventh century CE) and the much earlier Gathasaptashati in Prakrit (second century CE). In fact, the Hitopadesha itself came to be excerpted in later texts in like fashion.
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