In the early 19th century the British Raj was slowly solidifying its control over India. It was a complicated process, involving many negotiations and treaties. The British realised that a better understanding of the history of the land they were colonising would be necessary. With this view, a few British Orientalists founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 to translate and help them understand Indian texts better.
One of them was Francis Gladwin, a lexicographer. A master of Persian and English, he had served in the Bengal army and later taught at Fort William College in Calcutta. Gladwin stumbled upon a Persian anthology of stories, named Tutinama, composed by Muhammad Qadiri in the 17th century.
Qadiri’s work was an abridged version of the original work by the same name – Tutinama – written by Ziya al-Din Nakhshabi, a Persian physician and Sufi saint. He had migrated from Persia and found patronage under a Muslim ruler. In was in Persia that he translated the Sanskrit version of the story. The anthology consists of fifty-two tales, one for each week of the year, narrated through a parrot to a merchant’s wife named Khojisteh.
Gladwin translated the entire work into English in a volume that ran more than three hundred pages. It was a bilingual translation which suggests that it was meant to be teaching material for students of orientalist schools in colonial India.
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