Much has been written about the global dissemination of the Indian story cycle that lies at the origin of many of the stories found in Kalīlah and Dimnah. The Arabic, Syriac, and multiple Persian versions have been studied in depth, and attention has been paid to the versions in Turkic languages, Malay, Japanese, Spanish, and German. Yet within this story of global circulation, the Georgian strand, which included at least six different versions, has been relatively neglected. This may be in part because Georgian literature seems even more marginal to global literary flows than the literatures already mentioned.
The Kalīlah and Dimnah story cycle has played a pivotal role in Georgian literature, culture, and history, not just in the creation of a literary culture, but of a political ethos for Georgian rulers. Multiple kings set themselves the task of rendering this story cycle into Georgian. Although their efforts were not always successful, Georgian kings’ persistent ambition to rewrite and appropriate a collection of animal stories suggests that these stories had not just literary value, but also a political significance. They played a role in crystallizing and justifying a unique concept of governance—one that is lost on us today. According to this concept, even where ethics does not dominate, a certain kind of reason does. Wisdom, even when calculating, is central to this approach to governance: the wise king is one who does not lust after power and does not overstep his mandate.
Vakhtang VI, image included in Todua (2012)
In his effort to cultivate his reputation as among the most enlightened of Georgian monarchs, Vakhtang followed in the tradition of older rulers, including his namesake Vakhtang I Gorgasali (r. 447/49 – 502/22) and Anushirvan (r. 531-579), the emperor of Sasanian Iran who initially ordered the translation of the Indian tales into Pahlavi, the Sasanian language of state. Although he was operating in a radically different world, Vakhtang went out of his way to fashion himself as a Persianate monarch in the tradition of the famed Anushirvan. The portrait at right, from a manuscript in St. Petersburg’s Oriental Institute, shows a king openly fashioning himself as an Iranian monarch, through his Safavid-style clothing and conical hat.
When he undertook to translate Kalīlah and Dimnah into Georgian, Vakhtang turned to the most recent version of the text. Earlier Georgian commentators had relied on the only version to which they had access, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Arabic text, but by the eighteenth century the most relevant and accessible version was the fifteenth-century Lights of the Canopus (Anvār-i Suhaylī), translated by Wāʿiẓ Kāshifī at the Timurid court in modern day Afghanistan. But Vakhtang was not the first Georgian king to be so fascinated by this collection of stories that he attempted to render it into Georgian.
Already in the sixteenth century, Kāshifī’s contemporary King David I of Kakheti compiled a partial translation, which is no longer extant but thought to have been based on the twelfth-century Persian translation of Naṣr Allāh Munshī. According to Persianist Christine van Ruymbeke, Kāshifī’s version is significantly more political in its orientation than the version by Naṣr Allāh Munshī. As van Ruymbeke argues, Kāshifī portrayed a world in which “people and animals, through their language, their costume, their actions, are all busy at calculated role-playing and at manipulation” (p. 353).
This may account in part for the text’s increased relevance to the eighteenth-century Georgian court, caught between a domineering if declining Safavid empire and an emergent and threatening Russian state. Just a few generations earlier, in 1624, Vakhtang’s ancestor Queen Ketevan had been brutally executed at the Safavid court for refusing to convert to Islam. The Georgian rulers had learned their lesson: they were ready to submit to Iranian sovereignty in order to save their lives and to preserve their kingdoms. The strategies that Georgian rulers crafted for surviving as sovereigns of small kingdoms dependent on the goodwill of larger powers were amply reflected and reinforced in many stories of Kalīlah and Dimnah.
Across many versions of the text, innocent animals are tricked by clever animals who are more pernicious than they seem, as in the story of a pious cat who advises a partridge and rabbit to “fear God and seek nothing but the truth” (§7.17, Fishbein and Montgomery’s translation) when in fact he plans to eat them alive. In another story, a crow chastises himself for speaking against the planned coronation of an owl. As he eventually admits, his mistake is that he did not consult those wiser than himself, concluding: “Failure to consult a wise counselor and act on his opinion . . . guarantees unhappiness with the results” (§7.19, Fishbein and Montgomery). Such lessons were invaluable to Georgian kings who had to carefully navigate their relationships with more powerful rulers.
Vakhtang was so enthralled by Kalīlah and Dimnah that he played a role in the creation of no less than three separate versions of the text during his relatively short eight-year reign. First, he commissioned an anonymous translation from an Iranian living at the Georgian court (though a different court resident, an Armenian, completed it). Unsatisfied with this version and wishing to acquaint himself better with the Persian original, Vakhtang himself undertook a word-for-word translation of Kāshifī’s text. Finally, Vakhtang commissioned a more literary version of his word-for-word translation from his teacher and mentor, Sulkhan Saba Orbeliani. In his pioneering critical study of the transmission of the Kalīlah and Dimnah story cycle, Georgian scholar M.A. Todua describes Sulkhan Saba Orbeliani’s version as “the first anthology of Georgian poetics” due to its comprehensive use of Georgian metrical schemes (p. 338).
What drew Georgian monarchs to this story collection that had already traversed so many languages? Prior to the Georgian engagement with this story cycle, all known translations and adaptations of Kalīlah and Dimnah were created by writers with no aspirations to rulership. Notably, two of these writers—Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and Naṣr Allāh Munshī—were executed by their own rulers. Their fates suggest that this story cycle endangered those who dedicated themselves to its dissemination—not because the stories challenged power, but because they revealed its inner workings. Yet it was for this very reason that Georgian kings David and Vakhtang dedicated themselves to creating and circulating Georgian versions and to popularizing the ethos of these stories at the Georgian court.
Rather than sending a message to their rulers with their translated prose, as had been the aim of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Naṣr Allāh Munshī, and Kāshifī, David and Vakhtang were distilling advice both for themselves as well as for their subjects. Like the polities they governed, they were trapped between rival empires and warring states. Tasked with protecting the borders of kingdoms that were perpetually threatened with destruction, they turned to Kalīlah and Dimnah for guidance. For these precariously positioned rulers, the Kalīlah and Dimnah story cycle provided a practical guide to survival amid intense political hostility.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is Director of the European Research Council funded project Global Literary Theory. She is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and author of The Persian Prison Poem (2021), among other books.