Indian Fairy Tales (23 page)

The cook prepared all the dishes, and then stood at the kitchen door,
wiping the sweat off his body. "Now's my time!" thought Mr. Crow, and
alighted on a dish containing some dainty food. Click! The cook heard
it, and looked round. Ah! he caught the Crow, and plucked all the
feathers out of his head, all but one tuft; he powdered ginger and
cummin, mixed it up with butter-milk, and rubbed it well all over the
bird's body.

"That's for spoiling my master's dinner and making me throw it away!"
said he, and threw him into his basket. Oh, how it hurt!

By-and-by the Pigeon came in, and saw the Crow lying there, making a
great noise. He made great game of him, and repeated a verse of poetry:

"Who is this tufted crane I see
Lying where he's no right to be?
Come out! my friend, the crow is near,
And he may do you harm, I fear!"

To this the Crow answered with another:

"No tufted crane am I—no, no!
I'm nothing but a greedy crow.
I would not do as I was told,
So now I'm plucked, as you behold."

And the Pigeon rejoined with a third verse:

"You'll come to grief again, I know—
It is your nature to do so;
If people make a dish of meat,
'Tis not for little birds to eat."

Then the Pigeon flew away, saying: "I can't live with this creature any
longer." And the Crow lay there groaning till he died.

The story literature of India is in a large measure the outcome of the
moral revolution of the peninsula connected with the name of Gautama
Buddha. As the influence of his life and doctrines grew, a tendency
arose to connect all the popular stories of India round the great
teacher. This could be easily effected owing to the wide spread of the
belief in metempsychosis. All that was told of the sages of the past
could be interpreted of the Buddha by representing them as pre-
incarnations of him. Even with Fables, or beast-tales, this could be
done, for the Hindoos were Darwinists long before Darwin, and regarded
beasts as cousins of men and stages of development in the progress of
the soul through the ages. Thus, by identifying the Buddha with the
heroes of all folk-tales and the chief characters in the beast-drolls,
the Buddhists were enabled to incorporate the whole of the story-store
of Hindostan in their sacred books, and enlist on their side the tale-
telling instincts of men.

In making Buddha the centre figure of the popular literature of India,
his followers also invented the Frame as a method of literary art. The
idea of connecting a number of disconnected stories familiar to us from
The Arabian Nights
, Boccaccio's
Decamerone
, Chaucer's
Canterbury
Tales
, or even
Pickwick
, is directly traceable to the plan of
making Buddha the central figure of India folk-literature. Curiously
enough, the earliest instance of this in Buddhist literature was intended
to be a Decameron, ten tales of Buddha's previous births, told of each
of the ten Perfections. Asvagosha, the earlier Boccaccio, died when he
had completed thirty-four of the Birth-Tales. But other collections were
made, and at last a corpus of the JATAKAS, or Birth-Tales of the Buddha,
was carried over to Ceylon, possibly as early as the first introduction of
Buddhism, 241 B.C. There they have remained till the present day, and
have at last been made accessible in a complete edition in the original
Pali by Prof. Fausböll.

These JATAKAS, as we now have them, are enshrined in a commentary on
the
gathas
, or moral verses, written in Ceylon by one of
Buddhaghosa's school in the fifth century A.D. They invariably begin
with a "Story of the Present," an incident in Buddha's life which
calls up to him a "Story of the Past," a folk-tale in which he had
played a part during one of his former incarnations. Thus the fable of
the Lion and the Crane, which opens the present collection, is
introduced by a "Story of the Present" in the following words:—

"A service have we done thee" [the opening words of the
gatha
or
moral verse]. "This the Master told while living at Jetavana concerning
Devadatta's treachery. Not only now, O Bhickkus, but in a former
existence was Devadatta ungrateful. And having said this he told a
tale" Then follows the tale as given above, and the commentary
concludes: "The Master, having given the lesson, summed up the Jataka
thus: 'At that time, the Lion was Devadatta, and the Crane was I
myself.'" Similarly, with each story of the past the Buddha identifies
himself, or is mentioned as identical with, the virtuous hero of the
folk-tale. These Jatakas are 550 in number, and have been reckoned to
include some 2000 tales. Some of these had been translated by Mr.
Rhys-Davids (
Buddhist Birth Stories, I.
, Trübner's Oriental
Library, 1880), Prof. Fausböll (
Five Jatakas
, Copenhagen), and Dr.
R. Morris (
Folk-Lore Journal
, vols. ii.-v.). A few exist sculptured
on the earliest Buddhist Stupas. Thus several of the circular figure
designs on the reliefs from Amaravati, now on the grand staircase of the
British Museum, represent Jatakas, or previous births of the Buddha.

Some of the Jatakas bear a remarkable resemblance to some of the most
familiar FABLES OF AESOP. So close is the resemblance, indeed, that it
is impossible not to surmise an historical relation between the two.
What this relation is I have discussed at considerable length in the
"History of the Aesopic Fable," which forms the introductory volume to
my edition of Caxton's
Esope
(London, D. Nutt, "Bibliothèque de
Carabas," 1889). In this place I can only roughly summarise my results.
I conjecture that a collection of fables existed in India before Buddha
and independently of the Jatakas, and connected with the name of
Kasyapa, who was afterwards made by the Buddhists into the latest of
the twenty-seven pre-incarnations of the Buddha. This collection of the
Fables of Kasyapa was brought to Europe with a deputation from the
Cingalese King Chandra Muka Siwa (obiit 52 A.D.) to the Emperor
Claudius about 50 A.D., and was done into Greek as the [Greek: Logoi
Lubikoi] of "Kybises." These were utilised by Babrius (from whom the
Greek Aesop is derived) and Avian, and so came into the European Aesop.
I have discussed all those that are to be found in the Jatakas in the
"History" before mentioned, i. pp. 54-72 (see Notes i. xv. xx.). In
these Notes henceforth I refer to this "History" as my
Aesop
.

There were probably other Buddhist collections of a similar nature to
the Jatakas with a framework. When the Hindu reaction against Buddhism
came, the Brahmins adapted these, with the omission of Buddha as the
central figure. There is scarcely any doubt that the so-called FABLES
OF BIDPAI were thus derived from Buddhistic sources. In its Indian form
this is now extant as a
Panchatantra
or Pentateuch, five books
of tales connected by a Frame. This collection is of special interest
to us in the present connection, as it has come to Europe in various
forms and shapes. I have edited Sir Thomas North's English version of
an Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of a Latin version of a
Hebrew translation of an Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi version of
the Indian original (
Fables of Bidpai
, London, D. Nutt,
"Bibliothèque de Carabas," 1888). In this I give a genealogical table
of the various versions, from which I calculate that the tales have
been translated into thirty-eight languages in 112 different versions,
twenty different ones in English alone. Their influence on European
folk-tales has been very great: it is probable that nearly one-tenth of
these can be traced to the Bidpai literature. (See Notes v. ix. x.
xiii. xv.)

Other collections of a similar character, arranged in a frame, and
derived ultimately from Buddhistic sources, also reached Europe and
formed popular reading in the Middle Ages. Among these may be mentioned
THE TALES OF SINDIBAD, known to Europe as
The Seven Sages of
Rome:
from this we get the Gellert story (
cf. Celtic Fairy
Tales
), though it also occurs in the Bidpai. Another popular
collection was that associated with the life of St. Buddha, who has
been canonised as St. Josaphat: BARLAAM AND JOSAPHAT tells of his
conversion and much else besides, including the tale of the Three
Caskets, used by Shakespeare in the
Merchant of Venice
.

Some of the Indian tales reached Europe at the time of the Crusades,
either orally or in collections no longer extant. The earliest
selection of these was the
Disciplina Clericalis
of Petrus
Alphonsi, a Spanish Jew converted about 1106: his tales were to be used
as seasoning for sermons, and strong seasoning they must have proved.
Another Spanish collection of considerably later date was entitled
El Conde Lucanor
(Eng. trans. by W. York): this contains the
fable of
The Man, his Son, and their Ass
, which they ride or
carry as the popular voice decides. But the most famous collection of
this kind was that known as GESTA ROMANORUM, much of which was
certainly derived from Oriental and ultimately Indian sources, and so
might more appropriately be termed
Gesta Indorum
.

All these collections, which reached Europe in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, became very popular, and were used by monks and
friars to enliven their sermons as EXEMPLA. Prof. Crane has given a
full account of this very curious phenomenon in his erudite edition of
the
Exempla of Jacques de Vitry
(Folk Lore Society, 1890). The
Indian stories were also used by the Italian
Novellieri
, much of
Boccaccio and his school being derived from this source. As these again
gave material for the Elizabethan Drama, chiefly in W. Painter's
Palace of Pleasure
, a collection of translated
Novelle
which
I have edited (Lond., 3 vols. 1890), it is not surprising that we can at
times trace portions of Shakespeare back to India. It should also be
mentioned that one-half of La Fontaine's Fables (Bks. vii.-xii.) are
derived from Indian sources. (
See
Note on No. v.)

In India itself the collection of stories in frames went on and still
goes on. Besides those already mentioned there are the stories of
Vikram and the Vampire
(Vetala), translated among others by the
late Sir Richard Burton, and the seventy stories of a parrot (
Suka
Saptati
.) The whole of this literature was summed up by Somnadeva,
c. 1200 A.D. in a huge compilation entitled
Katha Sarit Sagara
("Ocean of the Stream of Stories"). Of this work, written in very
florid style, Mr. Tawney has produced a translation in two volumes in
the
Bibliotheca Indica
. Unfortunately, there is a Divorce Court
atmosphere about the whole book, and my selections from it have been
accordingly restricted. (Notes, No. xi.)

So much for a short sketch of Indian folk-tales so far as they have
been reduced to writing in the native literature.
[2]
The Jatakas are probably
the oldest collection of such tales in literature, and the greater part
of the rest are demonstrably more than a thousand years old. It is
certain that much (perhaps one-fifth) of the popular literature of
modern Europe is derived from those portions of this large bulk which
came west with the Crusades through the medium of Arabs and Jews. In
his elaborate
Einleitung
to the
Pantschatantra
, the Indian
version of the Fables of Bidpai, Prof. Benfey contended with enormous
erudition that the majority of folk-tale incidents were to be found in the
Bidpai literature. His introduction consisted of over 200 monographs on
the spread of Indian tales to Europe. He wrote in 1859, before the great
outburst of folk-tale collection in Europe, and he had not thus adequate
materials to go about in determining the extent of Indian influence on
the popular mind of Europe. But he made it clear that for beast-tales and
for drolls, the majority of those current in the mouths of occidental
people were derived from Eastern and mainly Indian sources. He was
not successful, in my opinion, in tracing the serious fairy tale to India.
Few of the tales in the Indian literary collections could be dignified by
the name of fairy tales, and it was clear that if these were to be traced
to India, an examination of the contemporary folk-tales of the peninsula
would have to be attempted.

The collection of current Indian folk-tales has been the work of the
last quarter of a century, a work, even after what has been achieved,
still in its initial stages. The credit of having begun the process is
due to Miss Frere, who, while her father was Governor of the Bombay
Presidency, took down from the lips of her
ayah
, Anna de Souza,
one of a Lingaet family from Goa who had been Christian for three
generations, the tales she afterwards published with Mr. Murray in
1868, under the title, "
Old Deccan Days, or, Indian Fairy Legends
current in Southern India, collected from oral tradition by M. Frere,
with an introduction and notes by Sir Bartle Frere
." Her example
was followed by Miss Stokes in her
Indian Fairy Tales
(London,
Ellis & White, 1880), who took down her tales from two
ayahs
and
a
Khitmatgar
, all of them Bengalese—the
ayahs
Hindus, and
the man a Mohammedan. Mr. Ralston introduced the volume with some
remarks which dealt too much with sun-myths for present-day taste.
Another collection from Bengal was that of Lal Behari Day, a Hindu
gentleman, in his
Folk-Tales of Bengal
(London, Macmillan,
1883). The Panjab and the Kashmir then had their turn: Mrs. Steel
collected, and Captain (now Major) Temple edited and annotated, their
Wideawake Stories
(London, Trübner, 1884), stories capitally
told and admirably annotated. Captain Temple increased the value of
this collection by a remarkable analysis of all the incidents contained
in the two hundred Indian folk-tales collected up to this date. It is
not too much to say that this analysis marks an onward step in the
scientific study of the folk-tale: there is such a thing, derided as it
may be. I have throughout the Notes been able to draw attention to
Indian parallels by a simple reference to Major Temple's Analysis.