Organised by Beatrice Gründler (EXC 2020, Research Area 3: "Future Perfect") and Johannes Stephan (Freie Universität Berlin, "Kalila and Dimna – AnonymClassic", ERC).

South Asia has a millennial history of wide-ranging religious, cultural, and literary knowledge exchanges with the Persianate World. The Indian narrative heritage in particular, has been widely received, imitated and acculturated in classical Persian literature from the tenth century onwards. Collections of tales and stories such as the Jawahir al-asmar, the Tuti-nama, the Kalila wa Dimna, and the Sindbad-nama from the medieval period, as well as translations and adaptations produced during the Mughals (1526-1858) in India treat cultural themes and questions like gender in general and women in particular, love and eroticism, ruse and guile, social and individual power systems in rather different and distinguished ways. This presentation will focus on the study of ruse and trickery in the Persian adaptations of Indian tales included in the Tuti-nama and Kalila wa Dimna traditions. We will analyse the different perceptions, evaluations and functions of ruse in friendships and conjugal relationships, as well as the tricksters’ beguiling strategies which also appear as narrative techniques for the creation of essential dynamics of the narration and its entertainment / educational purposes.

Pegah Shahbaz is a senior fellow in Research Area 3: "Future Perfect" at the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities".