Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 book by copious invention; while some of them made ‘quest tales’ from the material, in which the book becomes a hidden treasure. The most famous translation into Arabic was by a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam. Another was probably by an honoured Jewish scholar. In those comparatively flexible days, scholars were able more easily than now to appreciate each other and work together across boundaries. There were religions then, not nations – a fact it is hard to remember in its dimensions when considering how things were in those days. For instance, to read the biography of Muhammad by ibn-Ishaq, the Muslim equivalent of the New Testament, where nations and national feelings are absent, and men and women are known as Muslims, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and there were no Arabs and Jews in our sense, since that is a division of modern times, to read this book is hard for a modern Westerner because of how we see everything in terms of nations and nationalism. So strange is it that the mind keeps seizing up and you have to stop, and start again.

      The query has been raised: What was the ‘secret ingredient’ of this Bidpai book, ‘this ocean of tales’, that enabled it to be absorbed without resistance, and to be loved by Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims, Jews? One answer was that in all these traditions it is established that tales and parables are for instruction and illustration as well as for entertainment. Medieval Europe rushed to translate the book because its fame was known, and they wanted its aid in learning how to live better. But nowadays we use this phrase in a different sense.

      One of the best-known and most influential of the old versions was Anwar-i-Suhaili, or The Lights of Canopus. There had been earlier Persian versions, but these were considered inadequate and even elitist. An emir, or general, called Suhaili (of Canopus) invited one al-Kashifi to make a new version. I was interested that Canopus was being used as a name in a culture and at a time when names were often chosen to describe qualities, or as an indication of qualities a person hoped to acquire. People were expected to regard names as signposts, as it were. Round about that time there came into existence a cluster of Persian classics, all of Sufic origin and inspiration. The Lights of Suhaili is one of these. It is the same in ‘feel’ and format as, for instance, Saadi’s Rose Garden, using the Bidpai tales as a frame, or lattice, around which are woven associated tales, anecdotes, reminiscences, current scientific information, and verse of different kinds. It is worthwhile insisting that this great classic, now regarded with a truly horrible reverence and solemnity, was a popular book, meant for entertainment, as well as instruction. But who was this general or governor whose name became the name of the book, so that he was, in the way of those times and regions, place, person, tradition – all at once – and was able to bring about the creation of a new Sufi classic, using the ancient Bidpai material to do it? And who was al-Kashifi, whose name means ‘that which is manifested’, or ‘shown’, or ‘demonstrated’?

      Canopus СКАЧАТЬ