There is a beautiful moment in Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India where the former prime minister recounts an ancient Persian legend, as cited by a visiting Iranian scholar, about two brothers getting separated in childhood and rediscovering their relationship as adults. Speaking in Allahabad, the Iranian scholar fondly remembered the siblings who “had forgotten all about each other and the only thing that remained in common between them were the snatches of a few old tunes which they still played on their flutes. It was through these tunes that [they] recognised each other and were reunited.”

It is not surprising that the legend sounds like the plot of an old Hindi flick (remember Yaadon Ki Baaraat, Amar Akbar Anthony and numerous others of the “lost-and-found siblings” trope?). As we know, Hindi cinema, or more accurately Hindustani cinema, has its roots in the traditions of the Urdu-Parsi theatre that the Parsis pioneered after they arrived in India, fleeing persecution from Islamic crusaders in their homeland. According to our Iranian scholar, the Parsis’ story had a happy ending, much like most of our old Hindi films. He said: “So also we come to India to play on our flutes our age-old songs, so that, hearing them, our Indian cousins may recognise us as their own and become reunited with their Iranian cousins.”

A similar instance of civilisational hope and memory is contained in a miniature painting from around 1620 depicting a dream of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. In the dream, the emperor embraces his Safavid rival, Shah Abbas of Persia. Painted by Abu’l Hasan, one of the gems of the Mughal court, the artwork has Jahangir standing on a lion atop a globe while a smaller, submissive Shah stands on a lamb. It symbolises Jahangir’s self-attested superiority and global dominance, but, also, more importantly, his desire for peace and harmony between India and Persia.

Nehru’s story about the Iranian scholar and the Jahangir painting are just two of the many memories from India’s longstanding, shared history with Iran that rushed to mind when Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugged his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu in February 2026, underlining India’s tacit siding with the Western supremacist-genocidal bloc in the ongoing Israel-Palestine war. As Modi’s intimate moment with Netanyahu overshadowed Jahangir’s desired embrace of the Shah of Persia four centuries ago, we realised how India has wilfully abdicated its history and cultural moorings, both civilisationally and diplomatically.

Between the flute and the drones, age-old songs and the sound of bombs, Jahangir’s gentle embrace and Modi’s over-confident hug, there lies another tale bearing testimony to the long camaraderie between India and Iran. The story of the origins of One Thousand and One Nights—Alf Layla wa-Layla—or more colloquially, The Arabian Nights, is both of the text’s remarkable journey across the world and of shared Indo-Iranian artistic influences that have made the book a rich storehouse of fantasy, history, and human experience.

Journey across time and place

One Thousand and One Nights is interesting for a number of qualities. But, first of all, because its stories are really good. The narrator, the princess Scheherazade, volunteers to enter into a storytelling contract with the murderous king Shahryar in order to save not just her own life but also that of her female compatriots. Each night, Scheherazade turns to the king and asks, “May I tell a story?” Upon his nodding, the princess proceeds to spin yarns, weaving together captivating narrative cycles that generate story upon story, keeping the king on tenterhooks and delaying her execution.

Like a master storyteller, she employs the strategies of deliberate delay and artful pacing, leaving the evening’s story incomplete and promising to finish it the following night: she tells the tale to live, turning on its head the title of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. The stories are so entertaining and the king is so eager to hear till the end that he puts off her execution and finally abandons his cruel plan.

Shazia Jagot notes in her essay, “A very short history of One Thousand and One Nights,” that Scheherazade’s “ingenious storytelling is the result of multiple skilful storytellers, most unknown, who composed, expanded, and translated these fictional tales in places, languages, and traditions that stretch from premodern India to 18th century France and indeed, our own contemporary present-day”. This is the most remarkable aspect of these stories: their unusual journey across the world and across time.

Even though the compendium is colloquially known as The Arabian Nights, most of these stories did not originate in the Arab world. Many of them originated in India and, in many ways, the form of the book is very Indian. Salman Rushdie, who has often cited One Thousand and One Nights as one of his major literary influences, said at a lecture delivered at Emory University: “There are a lot of Indian classical texts which like to have frame stories like the famous frame story of Scheherazade telling [tales] to stay alive. That idea of the frame narration is something which very much comes out of the Indian classical tradition.”

Be it the intriguing universe of the Mahabharata, the haunting forests of Panchatantra and Vetala Panchavimshati, or the deep blue infinity of Kathasaritsagara, the Indian classical tradition is known for its fondness for nested narratives that continue endlessly. Rushdie said, “The stories that ended up in The Arabian Nights at some point were translated into Farsi, which was the court language in India at the time. They were collected as a text which was called Hazar Afsana which means A Thousand Stories.” This lost book, which relied on Indian literary elements, travelled west from India and Persia into the Arabic speaking world—via once-famed West Asian capitals like Baghdad and Damascus—shedding some of the stories, picking up new ones along the way to acquire a new lease of life and a more romantic name: Alf Layla wa-Layla, the One Thousand and One Nights.

Like any migratory being, One Thousand and One Nights, too, simaultaneously looked ahead at new destinations and back at the beloved homeland. Chugging along, knowing not friends or foes, carrying past literary traditions and absorbing novel ones, it burst forth into Europe, initially into France, through Antoine Galland’s translation from Arabic to French. From there, the stories travelled to England, translated by Richard Burton, and “from English they got into the Disney studios and then it’s all, you know, Robin Williams and genies,” as Rushdie put it.

Complex contact

One Thousand and One Nights and its wondrous journey from the Ganga to the Mediterranean, is but one example of the larger, complex contact that India and Iran have had with each other down the centuries. The intimate association is also stained by numerous instances of political violence and bloody intrusions, of which one of the most infamous is Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1739.

Simultaneously, there was also the efflorescence of languages, styles, and architecture. Urdu, one of India’s many languages, was born out of the affair between the courtly Farsi and the vernacular Khari Boli. It gradually became the everyday language of bazaars and streets in north India and parts of the Deccan, prompting Gulzar to say, Badi aristocracy hai zabaan mein; faqiri mein nawabi ka maza deti hai Urdu (There is great aristocracy in this language; even in poverty, it gives the pleasure of royalty). The enigmatic Taj Mahal is another instance of Indo-Persian synthesis. The French art historian René Grousset described it as “the soul of Iran incarnate in the body of India.”

It is these instances of cultures and people coming together, of stories and imaginations traversing political boundaries and presenting societies with shared dreams, that confound and irritate an authoritarian. The authoritarian dreams of a closed society animated by a singular idea. They detest hybridity and multiplicity. They yearn for one nation, one culture. And, in doing so, they not only disregard history’s long march and everything of value in it but also deprive people of the social and economic benefits that ensue from the intermingling of ideas and cultures.

There is also the question of a nation’s reputation, which is closely linked to the commissions and omissions of the government of the day. Writing in The India Forum about the Modi government’s “ill-conceived policy on West Asia” and how it has “jeopardised India’s interests,” the noted historian and analyst Srinath Raghavan underlined the fact that “the strategic geometry and security architecture of West Asia will undergo important changes after this war as countries look for new partners. By our unseemly embrace of Israel and post-haste dumping of Iran, we have dented our future credibility as a partner.”

Abandoning an old friend and clinging to the coattails of a crazed bully, who is arm in arm with another crazed bully, do not speak highly of a reliable partner. New Delhi even refrained from condemning the assassination of the Iranian head of state. It offered mealy-mouthed condolences later, in the face of mounting domestic criticism. Many countries, not just Iran, would have taken note of India’s conduct. New Delhi’s transactional approach to foreign policy, bereft of underlying value, might pay crumbs of dividends in the short term but ultimately threatens to make India less relevant on the world stage, owing to the lack of trust.

But before the crumbs of dividends can arrive, the economic costs of the war in India’s proximate neighbourhood are already being felt across our cities and villages. The prime minister asked the country to adopt a slew of “austerity measures” before embarking on a lavish five-nation trip himself. His “seven-point plan” to protect India’s economy from the conflict in West Asia ranged from groundbreaking prescriptions such as “Avoid buying gold” and “Carpool”, to radical ideas such as “Grow organic” and “Postpone destination weddings”.

Standing in solidarity with Iran or, at the very least, condemning the attacks on it is not tantamount to approving the brutal regime of the Ayatollahs in that country. Iranians do not need patronising, and they certainly do not wish to be bombed on their way to becoming someone else’s version of democracy. Being flanked by Iraq and Afghanistan, they are all too aware of what America’s pious interventions can result in.

History, both its writing and reading, is not a nostalgic indulgence detached from the practical. The fact that history is one of the most contested subjects of our time shows its power. As the historian Romila Thapar has reminded us, “to comprehend the present and move towards the future requires an understanding of the past: an understanding that is sensitive, analytical, and open to critical enquiry.” Such an understanding includes an appraisal of cultural memories—such as the Persian legend recounted by Nehru, the painting of Jahangir’s dream or the roots of One Thousand and One Nights. Sometimes an old song can show us new ways, and the remembrance of things past can keep us from making costly mistakes.

Shivendra Singh is a writer from Lucknow.

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