Dr Christine van Rumbeke - The naughty female, in Kashefi’s version of the Kalila-Dimna
Channel: Recovering 'Lost Voices'
Date: 2016-03-01

Dr Christine van Ruymbeke - Soudavar Senior Lecturer in Persian, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge

The naughty female of the subaltern class in Kashefi’s version of the Kalila-Dimna
Abstract: Since their inception, Kalila-Dimna studies have been hijacked by Sanskrit and Syriac scholarship: the scholars in the Arabic and Persian literary fields who ventured to approach the famous text, have mostly concentrated their research time and effort on the vexing question of textual heredity, leaving almost unexplored the contents, purpose and range of the stories.

The Anvar-e Sohayli is a Persian rewriting of the Kalila-Dimna stories, written by Va’ez Kashefi at the Herat Court of Sultan-Hosayn Bayqara. Perched at the end of the hereditary line, this version of the stories has not yet received the scholarly attention which both its contents and the innovations introduced by its fifteenth-century rewriter deserve. The latter in particular, very helpfully opens up the understanding of the stories’ specific pedagogy and technique. My forthcoming monograph on the Anvar-e Sohayli figures as a pioneering study of the actual contents of the text, but also of the KD stories in general, so often mentioned, but remaining pitifully understudied.

Though usually mentioned under the basked-term “animal fables”, the stories contained in the KD versions often feature human characters. These are divided in a rigid bi-polar society: those dwelling at court, and those who are part of the proletariat. Several of the plebeian female characters and their actions and choices are examined in the present paper. I will argue for the need to thoroughly revisit the received idea that the stories are lightweight amusing literature. Beyond the apparent misogynous topics which are enacted in a specific type of farcical stories, one can decode at first level, a very serious engagement with unhappy marital bondage and the expression of attitudes not unfamiliar to feminist discourse. These stereotypes are pilloried and use emblematic premises for psychological demonstrations. This creates the necessity to decode the stories with the tools proposed by present-day gender-studies. And at the second, deeper level, these stories are vectors of cases of Game Theory avant-la-lettre.

Presented at The Subalterns Project, The First Workshop – on the pre-Safavid period, held at the University of Edinburgh, 7-8 November 2015.

For more detailed information about the project & the various workshops, please head to: http://www.shii-news.imes.ed.ac.uk/the-subalterns-project/