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India is considered a nation of stories, and, at the end of the 19th century, a number of people began actively championing the Indian origin of popular European stories. The meaning of the Indian term kathā or 'story', used in numerous Indian languages, is in actual fact very diverse and all-encompassing. The narrative, in its many different incarnations, is recognised as being a fundamental element of teaching in all Indian traditions, whether religious or secular, and is expressed through all of South Asia's languages, from Sanskrit to modern languages, whether these be Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or Munda. The story, be it referred to as a tale, fable, account or legend (carita), is only recounted orally, incorporated into scholarly commentaries or included in edifying collections on specific themes aimed at encouraging the general public to engage in a particular beneficial practice – charity, heroism, specific observance of the religious calendar (the vratakathās) – or illustrating the processes of karma and rebirth etc. There are kathās on all subjects, for all audiences and tastes. The edifying element, when this exists, must not overshadow the aspiration for entertainment, humour or irony in these stories, which by no means always have a 'moral', and which also play on the human drive to create realist, fantasy or picaresque worlds, for there is no restriction on register or tone. Text length varies greatly. However, constructions in the form of frame stories or stories within stories are a recurring characteristic of many works, whether it be that the narrator is a single character who, day by day, tells a new story to someone else as a means of remembering it, testing it… or whether it be multiple narrators seeking to present their arguments through stories they recount in turns.
In the case of several narrative collections, their most ancient versions are texts written in Sanskrit, the most famous being the collections of the Pañcatantra and Hitopadeśa, which have a lot of material in common and attracted the attention of researchers early on (Langlès 1790), Vetala Panchavimshati ("Twenty-five (tales) of Betal"), Singhasan Battisi ("Thirty-two (tales) of the throne), and Śukasaptati ("Seventy tales of the parrot ")). But the Sanskrit versions are far from being the only ones; the stories are constantly being retold (retellings) and rewritten. The notion of abundant versions and languages is a constant of Indian narratives, from Hindi to Bengali and everything in between, including Gujarati, Tamil etc. A number of these collections have spread semi-globally into Asia and the Arabo-Persian and beyond into the West. The Pañcatantra by Tamil Brahmin Bidpai is, indirectly or not, the inspiration for La Fontaine's fables, while other versions serve as the basis for the Arabic Kalila wa Dimna, and the Śukasaptati is reincarnated in the Tūṭī-nāma (the Persian 'Tales of a Parrot', Smith-Lesouëf manuscript 226).
An important narrative cycle that draws on all available trends and highlights the permeability between written and oral traditions in India's rich folklore is that of the examples of The Great Narrative (Bṛhatkathā by Guṇāḍhya), itself lost, which have found their way to our shores, whether in Sanskrit from Kashmir (e.g. Ocean of the Streams of Stories, Kathāsaritsāgara, by Somadeva, 11th century), or in Tamil from South India (Peruṅkatai). In the Buddhist world, the genre of Jātaka, stories on the Buddha's past lives, has spread in multiple languages (Pali, Sanskrit, Sinhala, and the languages of Central and Southeast Asia) and across multiple countries. Apart from the exceptionally rare circumstances involving translations explicitly claiming to be based on an original text, the channels for sharing these works are complex, as texts can often get mixed up. Indian narratives thus provide fertile ground for rewritings and for both comparative and structural analysis.
Written in january 2023
