Book review
The original text of the Panchatantra in Sanskrit was probably written about 200 B.C. by a great Hindi scholar, Pandit Vishnu Sharma. Some of the tales themselves must be much older, their origin going back to the period of the Vedas and the Upanishads (1500 B.C. to 500 B.C.). In the course of time, travellers took these stories with them to Persia and Arabia and finally, through Greece, they reached Europe. So far the Panchatantra has been translated into more than 50 languages of the world. How the tales of the Panchatantra came to be told is in itself an interesting story. A king in ancient India could not find a teacher who could make his three sons interested in the pursuit of knowledge. At last he found in Pandit Vishnu Sharma the teacher he was looking for. The study of the theories of philosophy, psychology and statecraft became engrossing when Vishnu Sharma drove the moral home through the mouths of talking animals and their escapades. One unique feature of the tales is that most of the characters are animals; another is that the tales form a chain of stories; third, each of the tales has a distinct moral; and yet another, the tales have different levels of appeal. The morals that the Panchatantra seeks to teach continue to be relevant to this day and the stories themselves have not lost their novelty even two thousand years after they were first told.