When Animals Teach Kings
What a collection of an ancient Indian animal stories teaches us about politics
Often, when we imagine how rulers from past eras learned to govern, we think of them getting instruction in law, learning from their elders, and reading guidebooks on conduct, such as Machiavelli’s The Prince. What we don’t think about — or if we do, what we often forget — is that many of these guidebooks on conducts were actually fables. They were stories about animals, texts in a genre that is relegated to the domain of children’s literature and not taken seriously by politicians today.
That is our loss, for such stories have much to teach us about governance.
In the modern era, we have another example of a politically potent text that is wholly concerned with animals: George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). Yet because Orwell was writing about a state — the Soviet Union — that was seen by his contemporaries as the antithesis of his European liberal democracies, it was easier to remove the political edge from this text and to treat it as just one more animal story.
During the early 18th century, the ruler of the kingdom of Kartli in Eastern Georgia, which was then under Safavid (Iranian) rule, decided to create a Georgian version of an ancient story collection, that was as influential across much…
