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Monty Python and the Mathnavī: The Parrot in Indian, Persian and English Humor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

John R. Perry
John R. Perry*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Cultural diffusion of a partially non-literate kind is intrinsically hard to demonstrate and document. The poles between which cultural currents flow across geographical space are not the simple loci of “high” and “low” cultures or of superordinate and subordinate civilizations. Aspects of elite culture trickle down, features of vernacular culture bubble up, to confound and subvert the orderly progression of literary and religious history beloved of conventional scholarship. And, of course, the key occasions of transfer are usually absent from the record.

One such current that is, however, sufficiently documented in general and specific terms to be accepted nem. con. as truly remarkable in volume, longevity and global efficacy is the overwhelmingly one-way traffic of seminal commodities, artifacts and ideas that flowed westward from the South Asian subcontinent between at least 300 B.C.E. and 1400 C.E. Along this stream, from the Punjab via the Iranian plateau and adjacent waterways to Mesopotamia, Syria, the Mediterranean and western Europe, were borne the Gypsies, the game of chess, the mathematical concept of zero and the notation with which to use it, the literary device of the Frame Story, and a flood of stories to stock it.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 63 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for Iranian Studies 2003

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Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was first presented at the Fourth Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies at Bethesda, Md., in May 2002.

References

1. The [Tale] Types cited in what follows are from Aarne, Antti The Types of the Folktale, ed. and tr. Thompson, Stith, 2nd revision (Helsinki, 1964)Google Scholar; the Motifs are from Thompson, Stith Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 6 vols. (Bloomington, Ind. 1955–58)Google Scholar.

2. See Thompson, Stith and also Ulrich, Marzolph, Typologie des persischen Volksmärchens (Beirut/Wiesbaden, 1984)Google Scholar; Pers. tr., Ṭabaqa-bandī-yi qiṣṣa-hā-yi Īrānī (Tehran 1371/1992), Type 1351.

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4. Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, ed. M. A. de Montaiglon (Paris 1854), 35–36; The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, ed. Thomas Wright, Early English Text Society (London, 1868), ch. 16; see Legman 1: 85, 201.

5. Ed. R. A. Nicholson, Book 1, lines 248–60.

6. Christensen, Arthur Contes persans en langue populaire (Copenhagen 1918), 63-64Google Scholar; cf. Marzolph, Typologie, Type 237.

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8. Parade Magazine, 30 December 2001, 5.

9. Legman 1:203.

10. See Calvino, Italo Italian Folktales (New York, 1980Google Scholar; collected 1956), no. 15.

11. See Marzolph, Ulrich Die Vierzig Papageien, Cehel Tuti: Das persische Volksbuch (Waldorf-Hessen, 1979), 4-10Google Scholar, 164.

12. See Marzolph, Ulrich “Persian Popular Literature in the Qajar Period,” Asian Folklore Studies 60 (2001): 227CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 231. I am obliged to Mark Luce for lending me a copy of the modern chapbook.

13. See Shuka Saptati: Seventy Tales of the Parrot, tr. from the Sanskrit by A. N. D. Haksar (New Delhi, 2000), esp. 5, 222–36.

14. History of the Forty Vezirs, tr. E. J. W. Gibb (London, 1886).

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16. Heard at Cambridge, UK, in the 1960s; cf. Legman 1: 203 (heard in New York, 1946).

17. Legman, 1: 203 (heard in Washington D.C., 1945).

18. Ramanujen, A. K. Folktales from India: a Selection from Twenty-two Languages (New York 1991), p. 306Google Scholar.

19. Ed. Nicholson, Book I, lines 1546–1848.

20. See, e.g., the version by Sadiq Hidayat as reproduced in Kamshad, H. A Modern Persian Prose Reader (London, 1968), 85-91Google Scholar.

21. See Marzolph, Typologie, Type 678.

22. Monty Python's Flying Circus, Videotape no. 15 (actors, John Cleese and Michael Palin).