The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 13 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (summer reading list txt) 📕

person who could seize and kill those bees was a youth with a moon on his forehead and stars on the palms of his hands—but there could be no such youth, and so their lives were safe.[FN#442] When the r�kshasas had all gone out as usual next morning, the damsel, having been revived by the youth, told him how the demons could be killed, and, to be brief, he was not slow to put her directions into practice.

After the death of the seven hundred r�kshasas, the youth took some of the kataki flowers and left the palace accompanied by the beautiful damsel, whose name was Pushpavati. They passed through the ocean and forest of kachiri in safety, and arriving at the house in the baz�r the youth with the moon on his forehead presented the kataki flower to his sister. Going out to hunt the next day, he met the king, and his turban again falling off as he shot an arrow, the King saw the moon on his forehead and desired his friendship. The youth invited the King to his house, and he went thither at midday. Pushpavati then told the King (for she knew the whole story from first to last) how his seventh wife had been induced by his six other wives to ring the bell twice needlessly; how she gave birth to a boy and a girl, and pups were substituted for them, how the twins were miraculously saved and brought up in the house of a potter, and so forth. When she had concluded the King was highly enraged, and next day caused his six wicked wives to be buried alive. The seventh queen was brought from the marketplace and reinstated in the palace, and the youth with a moon on his forehead and stars on the palms of his hands lived happily with his beautiful twin-sister.

 

In two other Hind� versions known to me—but the story is doubtless as widely spread over India as we have seen it to be over Europe—only the leading idea of Galland’s tale reappears, though one of them suggests the romance of “Helyas, the Knight of the Swan,” namely, the story called “Truth’s Triumph,”

in Miss Frere’s “Old Deccan Days,” p. 55 ff. Here a r�j� and his minister walking together come to a large garden, where is a bringal-tree bearing 100

fruits but having no leaves, and the minister says to the r�j� that whosoever should marry the gardener’s daughter should have by her 100 boys and one girl.

The r�j� espoused the maiden, much to the vexation of the 12 wives he had already, and then follows a repetition of the golden bell affair! as in the Bengali version. Drapadi Bai, the gardener’s daughter and the new r�n�, gives birth “right off” to 100 sons and a daughter, all of whom are thrown by the nurse on a dust-heap in which are a great number of rat-holes, the jealous co-wives fully expecting that the voracious rodents would quickly eat them up.

The nurse tells the young r�n� that her children had turned into stones; such is also the story the 12 co-wives tell the r�j� on his return, and he orders the poor Drapadi Bai to be imprisoned for life. But the rats, so far from devouring the children, nourished them with the utmost care. It comes to the knowledge of the 12 co-wives that the children are still alive, they are discovered and turned into crows—all save the little girl, who luckily escapes the fate of her 100 brothers, gets married to a great r�j�, and has a son named Ramchandra, who effected the restoration to human form of his crow-uncles by means of magic water which he obtained from a r�kshas�.

 

The other story referred to is No. xx of Miss Stokes’ “Indian Fairy Tales,”

which Mr. Coote could not have read, else he would not have been at the trouble to maintain it was impossible that Galland derived his tale from it: “so long,” says he, “as that story remained in the country of its birth—

India—it was absolutely inaccessible to him, for great traveller as he was, he never visited that far-off portion of the East.” The fact is, this Hindu story only resembles Galland’s, and that remotely, in the opening portion Seven daughters of a poor man played daily under the shady trees in the king’s garden with the gardener’s daughter, and she used to say to them, “When I am married I shall have a son—such a beautiful boy as he will be has never been seen. He will have a moon on his forehead and a star on his chin,” and they all laughed at her. The king, having overheard what she so often repeated, married her, though he had already four wives. Then follows the golden bell affair again, with a kettledrum substituted. When the young queen is about to be confined her co-wives tell her it is the custom to bind the eyes of women in her condition, to which she submits, and after she has borne the wonderful boy she promised to do, they tell her she has been delivered of a stone. The king degraded her to the condition of a kitchen servant and never spoke to her. The nurse takes the baby in a box and buries it in the jungle. But the king’s dog had followed her, and when she went off he took the box out of the earth and swallowed the baby. Six months after the dog brings him up, caresses him and swallows him again. He does likewise at the end of the year, and the dog’s keeper, having seen all told the four wives. They say to the king the dog had torn their clothes, and he replies, he’ll have the brute shot tomorrow. The dog overhears this and runs off to the king’s cow; he induces her to save the child by swallowing him, and the cow consents. Next day the dog is shot, and so on: the cow is to be killed and induces the king’s horse to swallow the child, and so on.—There may have been originally some mystical signification attached to this part of the tale, but it has certainly no connection with our story.[FN#443]

 

I had nearly omitted an Arabian version of the outcast infants which seems to have hitherto escaped notice by story-comparers. Moreover, it occurs in a text of The Nights, to wit, the Wortley-Montague MS., Nights 472-483, in the story of Abou Neut and Abou Neeuteen = Ab� Niyyet and Ab� Niyyeteyn, according to Dr. Redhouse; one of those translated by Jonathan Scott in vol. vi. of his edition of the “Arabian Nights,” where, at p. 227, the hero marries the King’s youngest daughter and the King in dying leaves him heir to his throne, a bequest which is disputed by the husbands of the two elder daughters. The young queen is brought to bed of a son, and her sisters bribe the midwife to declare that she has given birth to a dog and throw the infant at the gate of one of the royal palaces. The same occurs when a second son is born. But at the third lying-in of the princess her husband takes care to be present, and the beautiful daughter she brings forth is saved from the clutches of her vindictive sisters. The two little princes are taken up by a gardener and reared as his own children. In course of time, it happened that the King (Ab�

Neeut) and his daughter visited the garden and saw the two little boys playing together and the young princess felt an instinctive affection for them, and the King, finding them engaged in martial play, making clay-horses, bows and arrows, &c., had the curiosity to inquire into their history. The dates when they were found agreed with those of the queen’s delivery; the midwife also confessed; and the King left the guilty parties to be punished by the pangs of their own consciences, being convinced that envy is the worst of torments. The two young princes were formally acknowledged and grew up to follow their father’s example.

 

We must go back to India once more if we would trace our tale to what is perhaps its primitive form, and that is probably of Buddhist invention; though it is quite possible this may be one of the numerous fiction which have been time out of mind the common heritage of nearly all peoples, and some of which the early Buddhists adapted to their own purposes. Be this as it may, in the following tale, from Dr. Mitra’s “Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nep�l”

(Calcutta: 1882), pp. 65, 66, we seem to have somewhat like the germ of the Envious Sisters:

 

BUDDHIST VERSION.

 

King Brahmadatta picked up in Kampilla a destitute girl named Padm�vati, who scattered lotuses at every step she moved, and made her his favourite queen.

She was very simple-minded. Other queens used to play tricks upon her, and at the time of her first delivery cheated her most shamefully. The wicked ladies said to her on that occasion, “Dear Padma, you are a rustic girl; you do not know how to give birth to a royal child. Let us help you.” She yielded. They covered her eyes, threw into the river the twin boys she had brought forth, and smeared her face with blood. They deceived her by telling her that it was only a lump of flesh that she had given birth to, and it had been thrown into the river. At the same time they informed her husband that Padma had eaten up her two new-born sons. The King enraged at her inhuman conduct, ordered her to instant execution. But there was a shrewd man in the court who privately saved her life. A divinity appeared to the King in a dream, and revealed the whole truth to him. The King made a strict investigation in the harem, and found that Padm�vati had been perfectly innocent. He became disconsolate, and gave vent to loud lamentations. Soon after some fishermen appeared at court and presented the King with two infants, who betrayed their royal lineage by the resemblance which their features bore to those of the King. They were reported to have been found in a vessel floating on the river. The courtier who saved Padma’s life now wished to produce her before the King, but she refused to return and proceeded to her father’s hermitage. After the death of her father she travelled through various places in the habit of a devotee; and in the course of her peregrinations she stopped at Ban�res, from whence Brahmadatta conducted her to his capital with great honour.

 

I am of opinion that this Buddhist tale is the original form of the “Envious Sisters”— that it ended with the restoration of the children and the vindication of the innocence of their mother. The second part of our story has no necessary connection with the first, the elements of which it is composed being found in scores—nay, hundreds—of popular fictions in every country: the quest of wonderful or magical objects; one brother setting out, and by neglecting to follow the advice tendered him by some person he meets on his way, he comes to grief; a second brother follows, with the same result; and it is reserved for the youngest, and the least esteemed, to successfully accomplish the adventure. In the second part of the “Envious Sisters,” the girl, the youngest of the three children, plays the part of the usual hero of folk-tales of this class. There is, generally, a seemingly wretched old man—a hideous, misshapen dwarf—or an ugly, decrepit old woman—who is treated with rudeness by the two elder adventurers, so they do not speed in their enterprise; but the youngest addresses the person in respectful terms—shares his only loaf with him—and is