Indian Fairy Tales (25 page)

The verses at the end are the earliest parts of the Jataka, being in
more archaic Pali than the rest: the story is told by the commentator
(c. 400 A.D.) to illustrate them. It is probable that they were brought
over on the first introduction of Buddhism into Ceylon, c. 241 B.C.
This would give them an age of over two thousand years, nearly three
hundred years earlier than Phaedrus, from whom comes our
Wolf and
Crane
.

II. PRINCESS LABAM.

Source
.—Miss Stokes,
Indian Fairy Tales
, No. xxii. pp.
153-63, told by Múniyá, one of the ayahs. I have left it unaltered,
except that I have replaced "God" by "Khuda," the word originally used
(see Notes
l. c.
, p 237).

Parallels
.—The tabu, as to a particular direction, occurs in
other Indian stories as well as in European folk-tales (see notes on
Stokes, p. 286). The
grateful animals
theme occurs in "The
Soothsayer's Son" (
infra
, No. x.), and frequently in Indian
folk-tales (see Temple's Analysis, III. i. 5-7;
Wideawake
Stories
, pp. 412-3). The thorn in the tiger's foot is especially
common (Temple,
l. c.
, 6, 9), and recalls the story of Androclus,
which occurs in the derivates of Phaedrus, and may thus be
Indian in origin (see Benfey,
Panschatantra
, i. 211, and the
parallels given in my
Aesop
, Ro. iii. 1. p. 243). The theme is,
however, equally frequent in European folk-tales: see my List of
Incidents,
Proc. Folk-Lore Congress
, p. 91, s.v. "Grateful
Animals" and "Gifts by Grateful Animals." Similarly, the "Bride Wager"
incident at the end is common to a large number of Indian and European
folk-tales (Temple, Analysis, p. 430; my List,
l. c. sub voce
).
The tasks are also equally common (
cf.
"Battle of the Birds" in
Celtic Fairy Tales
), though the exact forms as given in
"Princess Labam" are not known in Europe.

Remarks
.—We have here a concrete instance of the relation of
Indian and European fairy-tales. The human mind may be the same
everywhere, but it is not likely to hit upon the sequence of incidents,
Direction tabu
—
Grateful Animals
—
Bride-wager
—
Tasks
, by
accident, or independently: Europe must have borrowed from India, or
India from Europe. As this must have occurred within historic times,
indeed within the last thousand years, when even European peasants
are not likely to have
invented
, even if they believed, in the incident
of the grateful animals, the probability is in favour of borrowing from
India, possibly through the intermediation of Arabs at the time of the
Crusades. It is only a probability, but we cannot in any case reach more
than probability in this matter, just at present.

III. LAMBIKIN.

Source
.—Steel-Temple,
Wideawake Stories
, pp. 69-72,
originally published in
Indian Antiquary
, xii. 175. The droll is
common throughout the Panjab.

Parallels
.—The similarity of the concluding episode with the
finish of the "Three Little Pigs" (Eng. Fairy Tales, No. xiv.) In my
notes on that droll I have pointed out that the pigs were once goats or
kids with "hair on their chinny chin chin." This brings the tale a
stage nearer to the Lambikin.

Remarks
.—The similarity of Pig No. 3 rolling down hill in the
churn and the Lambikin in the Drumikin can scarcely be accidental,
though, it must be confessed, the tale has undergone considerable
modification before it reached England.

IV. PUNCHKIN.

Source
.—Miss Frere,
Old Deccan Days
, pp. 1-16, from her
ayah, Anna de Souza, of a Lingaet family settled and Christianised at
Goa for three generations. I should perhaps add that a Prudhan is a
Prime Minister, or Vizier; Punts are the same, and Sirdars, nobles.

Parallels
.—The son of seven mothers is a characteristic Indian
conception, for which see Notes on "The Son of Seven Queens" in this
collection, No. xvi. The mother transformed, envious stepmother, ring
recognition, are all incidents common to East and West; bibliographical
references for parallels may be found under these titles in my List of
Incidents. The external soul of the ogre has been studied by Mr. E.
Clodd in
Folk-Lore Journal
, vol. ii., "The Philosophy of
Punchkin," and still more elaborately in the section, "The External
Soul in Folk-tales," in Mr. Frazer's
Golden Bough
, ii. pp. 296-
326. See also Major Temple's Analysis, II. iii.,
Wideawake
Stories
, pp. 404-5, who there gives the Indian parallels.

Remarks
.—Both Mr. Clodd and Mr. Frazer regard the essence of
the tale to consist in the conception of an external soul or "life-
index," and they both trace in this a "survival" of savage philosophy,
which they consider occurs among all men at a certain stage of culture.
But the most cursory examination of the sets of tales containing these
incidents in Mr. Frazer's analyses shows that many, indeed the
majority, of these tales cannot be independent of one another; for they
contain not alone the incident of an external materialised soul, but
the further point that this is contained in something else, which is
enclosed in another thing, which is again surrounded by a wrapper. This
Chinese ball arrangement is found in the Deccan ("Punchkin"); in Bengal
(Day,
Folk-Tales of Bengal
); in Russia (Ralston, p. 103
seq.
, "Koschkei the Deathless," also in Mr. Lang's
Red Fairy
Book
); in Servia (Mijatovics,
Servian Folk-Lore,
p. 172); in
South Slavonia (Wratislaw, p. 225); in Rome (Miss Busk, p. 164); in
Albania (Dozon, p. 132
seq.
); in Transylvania (Haltrich, No.
34); in Schleswig-Holstein (Müllenhoff, p. 404); in Norway
(Asbjörnsen, No. 36,
ap.
Dasent,
Pop. Tales
, p. 55, "The
Giant who had no Heart in his Body"); and finally, in the Hebrides
(Campbell,
Pop. Tales
, p. 10,
cf. Celtic Fairy Tales
, No.
xvii., "Sea Maiden"). Here we have the track of this remarkable idea of
an external soul enclosed in a succession of wrappings, which we can
trace from Hindostan to the Hebrides.

It is difficult to imagine that we have not here the actual migration
of the tale from East to West. In Bengal we have the soul "in a
necklace, in a box, in the heart of a
boal
fish, in a tank"; in
Albania "it is in a pigeon, in a hare, in the silver tusk of a wild
boar"; in Rome it is "in a stone, in the head of a bird, in the head of
a leveret, in the middle head of a seven-headed hydra"; in Russia "it
is in an egg, in a duck, in a hare, in a casket, in an oak"; in Servia
it is "in a board, in the heart of a fox, in a mountain"; in
Transylvania "it is in a light, in an egg, in a duck, in a pond, in a
mountain;" in Norway it is "in an egg, in a duck, in a well, in a
church, on an island, in a lake"; in the Hebrides it is "in an egg, in
the belly of a duck, in the belly of a wether, under a flagstone on the
threshold." It is impossible to imagine the human mind independently
imagining such bizarre convolutions. They were borrowed from one nation
to the other, and till we have reason shown to the contrary, the
original lender was a Hindu. I should add that the mere conception of
an external soul occurs in the oldest Egyptian tale of "The Two
Brothers," but the wrappings are absent.

V. THE BROKEN POT.

Source.—Pantschatantra
, V. ix., tr. Benfey, ii. 345-6.

Parallels.
—Benfey, in § 209 of his
Einleitung
, gives
bibliographical references to most of those which are given at length in
Prof. M. Müller's brilliant essay on "The Migration of Fables"
(
Selected Essays
, i. 500-76), which is entirely devoted to the
travels of the fable from India to La Fontaine. See also Mr. Clouston,
Pop. Tales
, ii. 432
seq.
I have translated the Hebrew version
in my essay, "Jewish Influence on the Diffusion of Folk-Tales," pp. 6-7.
Our proverb, "Do not count your chickens before they are hatched," is
ultimately to be derived from India.

Remarks
—The stories of Alnaschar, the Barber's fifth brother in the
Arabian Nights
, and of La Perette, who counted her chickens
before they were hatched, in La Fontaine, are demonstrably derived from
the same Indian original from which our story was obtained. The travels
of the "Fables of Bidpai" from India to Europe are well known and
distinctly traceable. I have given a rough summary of the chief
critical results in the introduction to my edition of the earliest
English version of the
Fables of Bidpai
, by Sir Thomas North, of
Plutarch fame (London, D. Nutt, "Bibliothèque de Carabas," 1888), where
I have given an elaborate genealogical table of the multitudinous
versions. La Fontaine's version, which has rendered the fable so
familiar to us all, comes from Bonaventure des Periers,
Contes et
Nouvelles
, who got it from the
Dialogus Creaturarum
of Nicholaus
Pergamenus, who derived it from the
Sermones
of Jacques de Vitry
(see Prof. Crane's edition, No. li.), who probably derived it from the
Directorium Humanae Vitae
of John of Capua, a converted Jew,
who translated it from the Hebrew version of the Arabic
Kalilah wa
Dimnah,
which was itself derived from the old Syriac version of a
Pehlevi translation of the original Indian work, probably called after
Karataka and Damanaka, the names of two jackals who figure in the
earlier stories of the book. Prof. Rhys-Davids informs me that these names
are more akin to Pali than to Sanskrit, which makes it still more probable
that the whole literature is ultimately to be derived from a Buddhist
source.

The theme of La Perette is of interest as showing the
literary
transmission of tales from Orient to Occident. It also shows the
possibility of an influence of literary on oral tradition, as is shown
by our proverb, and by the fact, which Benfey mentions, that La
Fontaine's story has had influence on two of Grimm's tales, Nos. 164,
168.

VI. THE MAGIC FIDDLE.

Source
.—A. Campbell,
Santal Folk-Tales
, 1892, pp. 52-6,
with some verbal alterations. A Bonga is the presiding spirit of a
certain kind of rice land; Doms and Hadis are low-caste aborigines,
whose touch is considered polluting. The Santals are a forest tribe,
who live in the Santal Parganas, 140 miles N. W. of Calcutta (Sir W. W.
Hunter,
The Indian Empire
, 57-60).

Parallels
.—Another version occurs in Campbell, p. 106
seq.
, which shows that the story is popular among the Santals.
It is obvious, however, that neither version contains the real finish
of the story, which must have contained the denunciation of the magic
fiddle of the murderous sisters. This would bring it under the formula
of
The Singing Bone
, which M. Monseur has recently been studying
with a remarkable collection of European variants in the Bulletin of
the Wallon Folk-Lore Society of Liège (
cf. Eng. Fairy Tales
, No.
ix.). There is a singing bone in Steel-Temple's
Wideawake
Stories
, pp. 127
seq.
("Little Anklebone").

Remarks
.—Here we have another theme of the common store of
European folk-tales found in India. Unfortunately, the form in which it
occurs is mutilated, and we cannot draw any definite conclusion from
it.

VII. THE CRUEL CRANE OUTWITTED.

Source
.—The Baka-Jataka, Fausböll, No. 38, tr. Rhys-Davids, pp.
315-21. The Buddha this time is the Genius of the Tree.

Parallels
.—This Jataka got into the Bidpai literature, and
occurs in all its multitudinous offshoots (
see
Benfey,
Einleitung
,
§ 60) among others in the earliest English translation by North (my
edition, pp. 118-22), where the crane becomes "a great Paragone of
India (of those that live a hundredth yeares and never mue their
feathers)." The crab, on hearing the ill news "called to Parliament all the
Fishes of the Lake," and before all are devoured destroys the Paragon,
as in the Jataka, and returned to the remaining fishes, who "all with one
consent gave hir many a thanke."

Remarks
.—An interesting point, to which I have drawn attention
in my Introduction to North's Bidpai, is the probability that the
illustrations of the tales as well as the tales themselves, were
translated, so to speak, from one country to another. We can trace them
in Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic MSS., and a few are extant on Buddhist
Stupas. Under these circumstances, it may be of interest to compare
with Mr. Batten's conception of the Crane and the Crab (
supra
,
p. 50) that of the German artist who illustrated the first edition of
the Latin Bidpai, probably following the traditional representations of
the MS., which itself could probably trace back to India.

VIII. LOVING LAILI

Source
.—Miss Stokes,
Indian Fairy Tales
, pp. 73-84.
Majnun and Laili are conventional names for lovers, the Romeo and
Juliet of Hindostan.

Parallels
.—Living in animals' bellies occurs elsewhere in Miss
Stokes' book, pp. 66, 124; also in Miss Frere's, 188. The restoration
of beauty by fire occurs as a frequent theme (Temple, Analysis, III.
vi. f. p. 418). Readers will be reminded of the
dénouement
of
Mr. Rider Haggard's
She
. Resuscitation from ashes has been used
very effectively by Mr. Lang in his delightful
Prince Prigio
.