Mullah Nasruddin

I believe most of us in India grew up reading Tinkle comics. Apart from Tinkle, Amar Chitra Katha and Indrajal (Phantom, Mandrake et all) there weren't many comics. Oh yeah...there was Chacha Chaudhary too. But Tinkle remained my all time favorite. Over the years some of the characters in Tinkle comics have sort of become legends by themselves - Supandi, Shikari Shambu, Kalia the crow, Doob doob, Chamataka, Tantri the Mantri, Nasruddin Hodja... yeah remember him? It's about him that I want to talk about today.

For a long time I always thought that Hodja ('d' is silent), was a fictitious character - until I picked up a book called "The funniest tales of Mullah Nasruddin", at Hyderabad airport the other day. So much of my material for this blog post comes from that book and the credit / criticism goes to that author.

Nasruddin Hodja was born in 1208 in the Turkish village of Sivrihisar. Around 1237, he moved to Aksehir and lived the rest of his life until he died in 1284. Though he was quite famous during his own lifetime, the earliest written reference of him comes almost 200 years after he died in a book called Saltukname. Hodja was a priest who lived in extreme poverty during his lifetime but he was also one of the wittiest persons who lived during that era. It was his wit that brought him fame. His fame spread beyond Turkey...so much so that all the neighboring nations claimed that he was born in their country!!

How did Hodja come to be so funny? The legend goes that when Nasruddin was a young boy in school, two of his classmates killed, cooked and ate a lamb, which was probably their teacher's pet. The teacher was deeply anguished and shocked by this outrage and soon discovered who the culprits were. Hodja's classmates confessed that one of them had slit the lamb's throat, while the other had flayed and cooked the meat. As for Nasruddin Hodja, his sole role in the despicable affair was that he had watched and laughed during the entire proceedings.

So the teacher cursed the threesome: "Let him who slit the throat of my lamb have his own throat slit. Let him who flayed my lamb be himself be flayed. And let him who laughed be laughed at by the whole world"

Curse or no curse, Hodja has survived for the last 700 years :-) Millions of people continue to laugh at his wit. It might interest you to know that UNESCO had declared 1996 as the Nasruddin Hodja year and Turkey celebrates every year July 5th to 10th as International Nasruddin Hodja festival. So next time you read about this legend, do remember that he died of hunger as a very poor man but left billions of smiles through centuries - that are truly priceless.