Treat Literature With Care

This kind of literature may not be fashionable today but it still needs to be treated with care. And this is exactly what Katyayani Agarwal, restoration expert is doing.

Invited by the Lucknow chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) to talk about her work, Katyayani gave the example of Anw?r-e-Suhaili or The Lights of Canopus, a 16th century Mughal manuscript restored recently by her and which was once a standard examination text in the Indian Civil Service and the Indian ARmy during the days of British rule.

Anwar-e-Suhaili is the Persian translation of the Panchatantra, the ancient Indian collection of fables probably from a few centuries before the birth of Christ. The manuscript gets its Persian name from Canopus the second brightest star in the night sky named after Spartan navigator Canopus.

The author of the original Anwar-e-Suhaili is Husain bin al Kashifi who wrote this manuscript in Herat around 1504. Impressed by the wisdom of its maxims, Mughal Emperor Akbar commissioned his own version of an illustrated Anwar-e-Suhaili for his son Jahangir. Called the first ever comic book, this manuscript was lost for centuries and then found in bad shape, partially destroyed in a major fire in a Pune library before Katyayani and her team took to restoring it to the best of their ability.

The manuscript may not be of scholarly calibre but it is precious for its superb illustrations in which each animal is shown in detailed realism.

Anwar-e-Suhaili is not the only translation of the Panchatantra that has fascinated the world for at least two thousand years. In its entirety or in part, the text has been hand-copied, lithographed, and printed innumerable times. Much before the word secularism was reduced to a cliche, the stories of the Panchatantra were embraced by different cultures around the world. The message in each story is so secular and universal.

During the last 1500 years at least 200 translations of the Panchatantra have been unearthed in about 60 languages of the world including in Aesop fables, Arabian Nights, Sindbad and more than 50 percent of western nursery rhymes and ballads have their origin in Panchatantra and the Jataka stories.

The Panchatantra first migrated to Iran in the 6th century with Burzoe, a Persian physician sent to India in search of the sanjivani herb of immortality. During his travels he found the Panchatantra and fell in love with it. It is doubtful whether Burzoe went home with the sanjivani but on his return to Persia he did translate the Sanskrit manuscript into Pahlavi with the help of some pundits and titled it Kalilah wa Dimnah.

This first known translation of the Panchatantra into a foreign language was soon followed by a version in Arabic which introduced the Panchatantra to Europe. The third important translation was done two centuries later in Baghdad and became very popular, even paving the way perhaps for One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

By the 11th century, the Persian and Arabic translations of the Panchatantra had enthralled all of Europe, in particular the tales about animals in verse and prose which were eventually translated into all the major languages of the continent..

After Katyayani's presentation where she showed how sheets of the manuscript looked before and after restoration, Dr Mamta Misra, head conservationist at the INTACH Conservation Institute came forth to say how even you and me can learn the fine art of preserving old books and manuscripts.