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Noah’s Grandsons and the Elephant: Functions of Pseudepigraphic Writing in Persianate South Asia
Dr. Fabrizio Speziale (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris-Marseille)
This lecture examines Muslim elephant keepers, and the function of Persian forged texts in South Asian society. It will inquire into forgery as a tool to domesticate technological knowledge translated from Indic sources and to legitimate the status of a guild that has emerged from Muslims’ interaction with the South Asian natural environment and society. It investigates the function of apocryphal writing in the translation context as a stratagem to produce semantic shifts concerning features of both the translated and the translating cultures. In the Kursī-nāma-yi mahāvat-girī (Genealogy of the mahout), a text of uncertain period about the elephant and the elephant keeper, apocryphal writing functions as a device that allows to Islamize professional and technical skills assimilated from the Indian environment. This is accomplished by making them congruent with Muslims’ conception of the origin of technical and scientific professions as practices connected to the early Islamic prophets. Thus, the Kursī-nāma-yi mahāwat-girī creates a legend about the mahout as a profession practiced by Noah’s grandsons. This fictional account also entailed a reflexive meaning in that it operated a significant shift from earlier Muslim negative views on the elephant and provided a new framework for emerging Muslim professional groups involved in the care of this animal.