Rustam's Grandson in Central Asia
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Chapter 3 Rustam’s Grandson in Central Asia: The Sistan Cycle Epics and the Shahnama Tradition Gabrielle van den Berg A substantial part of the Shahnama deals with the heroes of Sistan, in par- ticular Rustam, who is a central figure especially in the large episodes on the legendary Iranian kings Kay Kavus and Kay Khusrau. Firdausi’s mastery in com- bining the stories of the kings of Iran with stories on the champions of Sistan no doubt greatly enhanced the success of the Shahnama. Stories of Rustam, the most famous hero of Sistan, certainly predate the Shahnama, though the exact nature of this epic material is obscure. Firdausi used material from this existing cycle of stories on the heroes of Sistan for his Shahnama, and by doing so immortalised Rustam and his family. However, it appears that Firdausi did not include all of the epic material circulating at his time. Other poets, such as Asadi Tusi, the author of the Garshaspnama, are be- lieved to have made use of the remaining material that may have continued to circulate in order to compose new epics or to elaborate on the episodes of Firdausi’s Shahnama. Alternatively, they invented additional stories on the basis of the Sistan stories as presented in the Shahnama. Over the centuries, these new stories, linked thematically to the Shahnama, were incorporated into Shahnama manuscripts and gradually came to be regarded as part of the original corpus as composed by Firdausi. By the inclusion of this epic mate- rial, the Shahnama grew by many thousands of verses. Later manuscripts of the Shahnama are significantly larger than the early manuscripts: an example of such an ‘extended’ Shahnama is Or. 2926 in the BL, dating from the early 19th century.1 Many of the later Shahnama manuscripts containing extra material origi- nate in India, where the Shahnama was a popular epic, especially since the establishment of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century. The British pres- ence in India led to an increased interest in Persian in Europe, Persian being the administrative language of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal emperors cher- ished Persian literature, and many Shahnama manuscripts were manufactured 1 See the description by Ch. Rieu, Supplement to the catalogue of Persian manuscripts in the British Museum, 129–32. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004356�5�_005 Rustam’s grandson in Central Asia 95 in India.2 By the 19th century, however, British rule was firmly established and the power of the Mughal emperors was waning. Shahnama manuscripts found their way to British officials and scholars and this ultimately resulted in the appearance of one of the first critical editions of the Shahnama by a captain named Turner Macan. Though still far from ex- cluding as much material as the later critical editors of the Shahnama, Turner Macan was aware or was made aware of the abundance of extra epic material in the Shahnama. He decided to discard this additional material from the text and to put it into appendices.3 Later editors, amongst whom most notably Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, based themselves on the earliest preserved manuscripts and removed many more spurious verses and episodes, perhaps most famously the episode of Rustam and the white elephant, a story of the young Rustam. Khaleghi-Motlagh proved that this episode was a later insertion and banned it to the footnotes of his now authoritative Shahnama edition.4 The first attempts to manufacture a critical edition of the Shahnama coin- cided with the introduction of printing in Iran and other Persianate countries, most notably India, and the critical edition of Turner Macan served as a model for the lithographed editions of the Shahnama that were disseminated in India and Iran in the 19th and early 20th century.5 The appearance of critical edi- tions together with the introduction of printing and the subsequent end of the manuscript tradition effectively ended the distribution of epic material that had formed part of the Shahnama tradition for many centuries. The additional epics eventually became forgotten and neglected. For a long time, Shahnama scholars focused more on the origins and what was deemed to be the original version of the Shahnama than on its evolution and devel- opment in the manuscript tradition, thereby practically denying the fact that the Shahnama constituted a living tradition—had this not been the case, the Shahnama would probably not have become famous as the Iranian national epic. Only in recent times a renewed interest in the added epic material has resulted in detailed research into the nature and background of the variant forms of this material. 2 See e.g. Sunil Sharma, “The production of Mughal Shahnamas. Imperial, sub-imperial, and provincial manuscripts”, 86–107. 3 Abū l-Qāsim Firdawsī, The Shah Nameh: an heroic poem, containing the history of Persia from Kioomurs to Yesdejird, ed. Turner Macan. 4 Abu’l-Qasem Ferdowsi, The Shah Nameh: The Book of Kings, ed. by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh. 5 As discussed by Marjolijn van Zutphen, “Lithographed editions of Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma”, 65–101..