WILLIAM FRANKLIN

William Franklin (dates unknown) was a vicar and a traveller, and a lieutenant of the East India Company in British India. He is known for his travelogue about Persia and India (Observations made in a tour from Bengal to Persia in the years 1786-7) and his translation – from the Persian – of the Indian love romance The loves of Camarúpa and Cámalata, supposedly written by a certain Tahsin al-Din, of whom there is no information.

The fragments:

The name of the author of The loves of Camarúpa and Cámalata, Tahsin al-Din, is probably either fictive or a pseudonym. The text is from an 18th century Persian manuscript, but other versions existed, as is expounded by a later French translator of the same story: Les aventures de Kamrup, by Tahcin-uddin, translated from Hindi by M. Garcin de Tassy (The Oriental Translation Committee of Great Britain and Ireland, Paris 1834). The latter considers the Persian text a modern version of an ancient Indian story. One of the copies of the Persian version was made by a certain Murschid-Abad, 1789. All commentators point at the resemblance between certain passages of this romance with the ‘Sindbad’ cycle of the Thousand and one nights, Franklin even suggesting that the author of the Sindbad stories might have been from India. Although the story contains the famous episode of the man-eating giant, known from the Sindbad cycle, it more likely is a version of the love romance of Sayf al-Muluk and Badi’at al-Jamal which also figures in the Thousand and one nights, and which was widespread in Asia in Persian and Turkish versions. It is a typical romance of a prince in search of his beloved, conquering challenges during his journey. It contains inserted tales relating the adventures of his companions. The translation shows not only the increased interest in original Oriental literature in Europe, but also offers a glimpse of texts which were popular in the Moghul empire in the pre-modern period.

Tahsin-al-Din, The loves of Camarúpa and Cámalata; an ancient Indian tale, tr. William Franklin, Cadell, London 1793, pp. 1-99.