A Group of Eastern Romances and Stories from the Persian, Tamil and Urdu. Anonymous

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СКАЧАТЬ their kind investigations regarding an inedited Turkish story-book. Private friends want no public recognition, but I should consider myself ungrateful did I omit to place also on record my obligations in the course of this work to Dr. David Ross, Principal of the E.C. Training College, Glasgow, to Mr. Leonard C. Smithers, Sheffield, and finally, but certainly not least of all, to my old and trusty friend Mr. Hugh Shedden, Grangemouth. With so much help it may well be thought my work might have been of higher quality than I fear is the case; but there is an ancient saying about expecting “grapes of thorns,” which I have made my excuse in a former work.

      W. A. C.

      

      INTRODUCTION.

INTRODUCTION.

       Table of Contents

      Man has been variously described as a laughing, a cooking, and a clothes-wearing animal, for no other animal laughs, or cooks, or wears clothes. Perhaps another definition might be added, namely, that he is a story-telling animal. From bleak Greenland to the sunny islands that be-gem the South Pacific, there seems to be no race so low in the scale of humanity as not to possess a store of legends and tales, which take their colouring from the ways of life and the habits of the people among whom they are found domiciled. But notwithstanding the very considerable number of popular tales that have been collected from various parts of the world, their origin and general diffusion are still involved in obscurity. The germs from which some of them sprang may have originated soon after men became sentient beings. It is possible, though not very probable, that the ideas on which are based the more simple fictions which are found to be similar—mutatis mutandis—among Non-Aryan as well as Aryan races were independently conceived; but this concession does not apply to tales and stories of more elaborate construction, where the incidents and their very sequence are almost identical—in such cases there must have been deliberate appropriation by one people from another. And assuredly not a few of the tales which became orally current in Europe during the middle ages through the preaching monks and the merry minstrels were directly imported from the East. But even when a tale has been traced through different countries till it is discovered in a book, the date of which is known to be at least 200 B.C., it does not follow, of course, that the author of the book where it occurs was the actual inventor of it. Men are much more imitative than inventive, and there is every reason to believe that the Buddhists and the Bráhmans alike simply adapted for their own purposes stories and apologues which had for ages upon ages been common to the whole world. All that is now maintained by the so-called “Benfey school” is that many of the Western popular tales current orally, as well as existing in a literary form, during the mediæval times which are found in old Indian books reached Europe from Syria, having travelled thither from India through Persia and Arabia, and that this importation of Eastern fictions had been going on long before the first crusades.

      Whatever our modern European authors may do in the production of their novels (the novel has no existence in the East), it is certain that Asiatic writers do not attempt the invention of new “situations” and incidents. They have all along been content to use such materials as came ready to hand, both by taking stories out of other books, and dressing them up according to their own taste and fancy, and by writing down tales which they had heard publicly or privately recited.[1] Indeed they usually mention quite frankly in the prefaces to their books from whence they derived their materials. Thus, Somadeva tells us that his Kathá Sarit Ságara (Ocean of the Streams of Story), of the 11th century, is wholly derived from a very much older Sanskrit work, of the 6th century, the Vrihat Kathá (Great Story), of Gunadhya; and Nakhshabí states that his Túti Náma (Parrot Book) is chiefly an abridgment, in more elegant language, of an older Persian work composed in a prolix style, which was translated from a book “originally written in the Indian tongue.” So we need not expect to find much originality in later Eastern collections,[2] though they are of special interest to students of the genealogy of popular tales in so far as they contain incidents, and even entire stories and fables, out of ancient books now lost, which have their parallels and analogues in European folk-lore.

      The first two romances in the present work form the third báb, or chapter, of a Persian collection of moral tales and anecdotes entitled Mahbúb ul-Kalúb, or the Delight of Hearts, written by Barkhurdár bin Mahmúd Turkman Faráhí, surnamed Mumtáz, concerning whom all that is known is given by himself in what Dr. Rieu terms “a diffuse preface, written in a stilted and ambitious style.” In early life[3] he quitted his native place, Faráh, for Marv Sháhiján, where he entered the service of the governor, Aslán Khán, and two years afterwards he proceeded to Ispahán and became secretary to Hasan Kulí Khán Shámlú: both amírs flourished during the reign of Sháh Sultan Husain, A.H. 1105–1135 (A.D. 1693–1722). At Ispahán he heard in an assembly a pleasing tale, which, at the request of his friends, he “adorned with the flowers of rhetoric,” under the title of Hikáyát-i Ra’ná ú Zíbá. In course of time he added other stories, until he had made a large collection, comprising no fewer than four hundred tales and anecdotes, divided into an introduction, eight bábs, and a khátimah, or conclusion, and he entitled the work Mahfil-árá—‘Adorner of the Assembly.’ After a visit to his native place, he went to Herát, where he remained for some time, and thence he set out on a pilgrimage to the shrine at Mashad. But on his way he was attacked by a band of Kuzzaks in the desert, who robbed him of everything, including the precious manuscript of his Mahfil-árá. Returning to Ispahán, it may be presumed, though he does not specify “the place of security,” he re-wrote from memory his collection of tales, dividing the work into an introduction, five bábs, and a khátimah. The work is formed on the plan of the Gulistán, or Rose-Garden, of the illustrious Persian poet Sa’dí, each section being devoted to the exemplification of a special subject or theme. The introduction comprises dissertations

      (1) On the necessity of Politeness;

      (2) On the behaviour of a householder, so as to obtain for himself happiness in this world and the next;

      (3) On the Education of Children;

      (4) On the advantages of following a Trade or Profession;

      (5) On Hospitality;

      (6) On gratitude for the benefits received from God.

      Then follow Five Chapters:

      I—On Civility, Humility, and Modesty, the virtues on which amicable intercourse with all conditions of men is based.

      II—On Good Manners and abstention from injuring others by word or deed.

      III—On Equanimity in Prosperity and Adversity, and Resignation to the will of God in all things.

      IV—On Friendship, or Association: the choice of a suitable Companion, and the rejection of an uncongenial or base one.

      V—On the Advantages of Contentment and the Meanness of Envy and Covetousness.

      Conclusion: Story of Ra’ná and Zíbá.

      The Persian text of this large collection of Tales was printed at Bombay in 1852. There are two MS. copies in the British Museum, one of which is described by Dr. Rieu as being embellished with two ’unváns, or ornamental head-pieces, gold-ruled margins, and 55 miniatures in the Persian style.

      In 1870 Mr. Edward Rehatsek published, at Bombay, a translation of the two Tales contained in the third chapter of the Mahbúb ul-Kalúb under the title of Fortune and Misfortune, which are reproduced in the present volume as the History of Nassar (properly Násir) and the History of Farrukhrúz, the Tales being quite distinct from СКАЧАТЬ