The girl with her parrot.
Ziya al-Din
Nakhshabi:
Tuti
namah
(Tales of a parrot)
(1330)
(from Badaun in North-Central India but written in Persian)
---------------------------
Ziya'al-Din Nakhshabi from Uttar Pradesh in India: Tutinama: Tales of a Parrot, is a 14th-century Persian series of 52 stories. The adventure stories narrated by a parrot, are moralistic stories to persuade his female owner Khojasta not to commit any adulterous act with any lover, in the absence of her husband. In this book one story of a Zangi slave.
Miniature from a Tuti namaah c. 1700 CE North India, Gujarat, Perhaps Surat
Taken from: Tales of a parrot by Ziya al-Din Nakhshabi
Based on the Indian Shukasaptati (Seventy tales of a Parrot) from
the sixth century. Sanskrit.
It is said that in a remote section of Kerman (1) there lived an emir… who had a jester… he sent for his jester…
On his way the jester met a Zangi whose face was so dark that it
turned the morning hours into evening and
the duskiness
of his countenance turned the day into night. His upper lip touched his nose and his lower lip came down to his chin.
With ebullient cheerfulness and without any music he was
stamping his feet. The jester asked him the reason for his gaiety.
The cause of my happiness , the Zangi said, is that late tonight after waiting for a long time, I am going to visit my sweetheart.
The jester asked, Who is your beloved? The Zangi replied, The wife of the jester. The jester inquired, How will you manage to
see her tonight? The Zangi answered, Envoys with great intelligence and much wisdom have
arrived to see the emir. For a
few days they will be his guests. The emir has summoned the jester so he will not be able to
return home while they are there…
The jester was so upset with grief over his wife and was so
jealous of the Zangi that no matter how much the
emir coaxed
him to laugh… his lips never parted…(so he was thrown in
jail)..............(see text under the pictures).............
...............
The jester removed the seal from his lips and related the
story of his own wife…
Then the emir ordered first that the face of the jester's wife be
made as black as that of the Zangi and that the two be thrown
into consuming flames.
(1) Kerman: known in ancient times as the satrapy of Carmania, is the capital city of Kerman Province, Iran.
The court jester meets a Zangi
dancing with joy, and learns from him that the cause of his happiness is his assignation with a woman who is
the jester’s own wife.
The wife of the amir, is shown here
being trampled to death along with her lover, the elephant driver. While in prison the jester caught them
having sex on top of the elephant
her lover had ridden up to her window. This brazen transgression made the imprisoned jester laugh so hard that
the amir was alerted to the illicit
affair. In the lower left the jester’s wife and her African lover, the Zangi, are being burned in punishment for their infidelity.