Cross-Media Narrative Transformations of the “Hunter Catches Birds” Tradition in Indo-Persian and Malay Worlds

The tale commonly known as “Hunter Catches Birds” circulates widely across South Asia, the Islamicate world, and insular Southeast Asia. Despite linguistic, religious, and cultural differences, the narrative architecture of the Hunter Catches Birds tale displays remarkable continuities across Buddhist, Persian, Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese traditions. Its persistence across radically different religious and cultural settings raises a broader question of how narrative meaning remains recognizable through continual reinterpretation. In early Malay renderings, particularly within the Hikayat Bayan Budiman tradition, oral materials are reorganized into framed and nested literary structures. These forms enable both textual and visual interplay while supporting ethical instruction alongside aesthetic elaboration. Frequently positioned as an introductory episode in parrot-cycle literature, the story integrates motifs such as collective escape, feigned death, interspecies conflict, and the tension between loyalty and betrayal. These narrative elements remain open to reinterpretation in different moral and cultural settings. Drawing upon Sanskrit, Persian, Uyghur, Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese materials, this study examines how the tale moved across oral, manuscript, and visual traditions. Rather than treating the narrative as a fixed folktale type, the article approaches it as a flexible modular structure whose ethical meanings were continually reshaped across changing religious and social environments. These interactions generate layered systems of meaning in which image and text jointly shape narrative tension, vulnerability, and strategic judgment. In Persian miniature traditions, scenes of entrapment, sacrifice, and escape are organized through sequential composition and spatial tension, allowing conflict, vulnerability, and narrative causality to be experienced visually as well as textually. By tracing these transformations, this study argues that the enduring vitality of the Hunter Catches Birds tradition may lie less in narrative stability than in the sustained reinterpretation of repeated narrative structures across textual and visual cultures.