The Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie (Penguin Classics) Read online

  THE FIVE-AND-TWENTY TALES OF THE GENIE

  There are no biographical details available for Śivadāsa, the author of The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie. From a careful reading of the text, however, we can glean the following facts: Śivadāsa was a man of great learning, even erudition; he wrote primarily for a certain type of reader – the gallants, well-educated, cultivated men-about-town with a keen interest in the fine arts and beautiful women. Śivadāsa’s text is often humourous; he is gently critical and takes a shot at pomposity, pretentiousness and sanctimonious hypocrisy. He poses problems that tease the reader into thought, making his work more than just a retelling of an ancient body of tales.

  CHANDRA RAJAN studied Sanskrit from the age of nine, in the time-honoured manner, with a pandit in Madras. She went to St Stephen’s College, Delhi, where she had a distinguished academic record and took degrees in English and Sanskrit. Trained early in Carnatic music, she studied Western music in New York. She has taught English at Lady Sri Ram College, Delhi University, and at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. Her publications include Winged Words; Re-Visions, a volume of verse; and Kālidāsa: The Loom of Time published by Penguin India in 1989. Chandra Rajan is currently working on a children’s version of the Panćatantra and a translation and critical study of Bāna’s famous prose romance, Kādambari, and a series of tales belonging to the Vikramaditya cycle: The Goblin Tales, also known as the Vetālapañćavinśati. She is also involved in a long-term project for the Sahitya Akademi – a translation of the complete works of Kālidāsa.

  ŚIVADĀSA

  The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie

  (Vetālapañćavinśati)

  Translated from the Sanskrit with an Introduction by

  CHANDRA RAJAN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Penguin Books India 1995

  Published in Penguin Classics 2006

  1

  Copyright © Chandra Rajan, 1995

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  The translation of Śivadāsa’s Vetālapañćavinśatika is based on the Sanskrit text

  edited by Heinrich Uhle, Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1914; and the extracts from Jambhaladatta’s

  Vetālapañćavinśati, on the text prepared for the AOS by M. B. Emeneau, 1934.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90792–5

  In memory of

  the three greatest storytellers

  of all times

  Vyāsa, Vālmīkī, and Viṣṇu Śarma

  Contents

  Key to the Pronunciation of Sanskrit Words

  Foreword

  Introduction

  About the Title: Who Is the Vetala?

  The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie as set down by Śivadāsa

  Preamble

  Frame Story

  TALE 1: Of Vajramukuta and the Beautiful Padmāvatī

  TALE 2: Of Mandāravatī and Her Three Suitors

  TALE 3: Of the Parrot and the Myna

  Subtale i: Of the Wicked Dhanakṣaya and His Virtuous Wife

  Subtale ii: Of the Wicked Wife and Her Good Husband

  TALE 4: Of Vīravara, the Noble Warrior

  TALE 5: Of the Beautiful Mahādevī and Her Three Suitors

  TALE 6: Of the Young Bride Who Switched Heads

  TALE 7: Of the Beautiful Tribhuvanasundarī, Beauty of the Triple World and Her Suitors

  TALE 8: Of King Gunādhipa’s Gratitude

  TALE 9: Of Madanasenā Who Kept Her Vows

  TALE 10: Of Three Very Delicate Queens

  TALE 11: Of King Janavallabha and His Fairy Bride

  TALE 12: Of the Royal Priest Who Lost All

  TALE 13: Of the Merchant’s Daughter Who Loved a Robber

  TALE 14: Of Mūladeva, Prince of Tricksters

  TALE 15: Of Jīmūtavāhana and His Supreme Sacrifice

  TALE 16: Of Unmādinī’s Fatal Beauty

  TALE 17: Of Guṇākara and the Yogī Who Lost His Magic Powers

  TALE 18: Who Is Prince Haridatta’s Real Father?

  TALE 19: Of the Brāhmana Boy Who Laughed Facing Death

  TALE 20: Of Star-Crossed Lovers

  TALE 21: Of the Four Foolish Brāhmaṇas Who Revived the Dead Lion

  TALE 22: Of the Yogī Who Went from One Body to Another

  TALE 23: Of Three Rather Fastidious Brāhmanas

  TALE 24: Of Strange and Riddling Relationships

  TALE 25: The Epilogue and Conclusion

  Appendix: Tales from The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie as set down by Jambhaladatta

  Benedictory Verses

  Preamble

  TALE 7: Of King Praćanḍasinha and his Friend the Skull-bearer

  TALE 11: Of the Three Flower-like Delicate Queens

  TALE 20: Of the Ascetic Who Entered the Corpse of a Brāhmaṇa Youth

  TALE 21: Of How Four Merchant Princes Fared With the Courtesan

  TALE 22: Of How Mūladeva Obtained a Bride for Śaśideva

  TALE 23: Of the Ogre Who Ravaged King Arimaulimaṇi’s Kingdom

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Key to the Pronunciation of Sanskrit Words

  Vowels:

  The line on top of a vowel indicates that it is long.

  a (short)as the u in but

  ā (long) as the a in far

  i (short) as the i in sit

  ī (long) as the ee in sweet

  u (short) as the u in put

  ū as the oo in cool

  e is always a long vowel like a in mate

  ai as the i in pile

  o as the ow in owl

  Consonants:

  k, b and p are the same as in English

  kh is aspirated

  g as in goat

  gh is aspirated

  ć as in church or cello

  ćh is aspirated as in chhota

  j as in jewel

  jh is aspirated

  ṭ and ḍ are hard when dotted below as in talk and dot

 
; ṭh is the aspirated sound

  ḍh is aspirated

  ṇ when dotted is a dental; the tongue has to curl back to touch the palate.

  ṇ as in king

  ñ is as in singe

  t undotted is a th as in thermal

  th is aspirated

  d undotted is a soft sound—there is no corresponding English sound, the Russian ’da’ is the closest.

  dh is aspirated

  ph and bh are aspirated

  ṃ is a nasal sound

  There are three sibilants in Sanskrit: S as in song, ṣ as in shove and a palatal ś which is in between, e.g. Śiva.

  Foreword

  The Vetālapañćavinśati, as it is generally known, is an important work of narrative fiction, the kathā, belonging originally to the rich, age-old oral tradition of storytelling in India, and later committed to writing. In its popularity and in its contribution to popular tales elsewhere in the world, it is second only to the Panćatantra.

  Of the four main recensions of this work of fiction, two are parts of larger wholes and two are autonomous texts, one by Śivadāsa and the other by Jambhaladatta. Śivadāsa’s text is the finer of these two and more interesting to modern readers, because it is problematic and raises issues that tease the reader into thought. It is a sadly neglected and little known text. In fact, it is a minor classic as I have attempted to show in the introduction. It deserves to be looked at as a literary text and not simply a collection of amusing tales.

  Because the kathā is a very important part of Sanskrit literature, I have devoted some space in the introduction to give a brief account of its distinctive features in both its oral and written expressions.

  Texts in the oral tradition are not ‘fixed’; they are therefore subject to many changes during the course of transmission. The various recensions of a text that originated in the oral tradition are not identical for this reason. I have therefore tried to give an idea of how different such texts can be in different recensions by translating and including in this volume parts of the other autonomous recension, by Jambhaladatta,in the appendix. I have included the frame story, the epilogue and conclusion, and six tales. Three of the tales, (21, 22, 23), of the Jambhaladatta text are not found in Śivadāsa’s recension of the Vetālapañćavinśatikā (the last syllable ‘ka’ expresses dimunition, to convey the idea that the tales are short). The three other tales common to both texts, numbers 7, 11, 20, in the Jambhaladatta text and tale numbers 8, 10 and 22, in Śivadāsa’s text are told differently. Śivadāsa often places his tales in a particular context and makes a point by juxtaposing two different points of view or draws an ironic parallel between opposing views, as in Tale 22—the difference between precept and practice. The sermon at the beginning on the worthlessness of earthly pursuits is in contrast to the Brāhmaṇa Nārāyana’s entering a youthful body in order to enjoy the many pleasures of life. Jambhaladatta simply tells the tale, as it is.

  1 Paush, Vikrama era 2051

  (19 December 1994)

  Chandra Rajan

  Introduction

  I

  No monarch in the annals of India’s long history has caught and held the popular imagination in wonder and delight as the fabled emperor, Vikramāditya (the Sun of Valour) has. Down the centuries, and throughout the length and breadth of the country, Vikramāditya’s magnificence and courage, nobility and wisdom and magnanimity have been proverbial. Warrior and conqueror, an undaunted hero, a scholar and patron of the arts, he was set up as the ideal monarch; a just and virtuous ruler, ever willing and ready to give, to reach out and to help the weak and needy, not counting the cost and without a thought of the greatest risks to his own life. His many adventures and exploits, those brave deeds exhibiting valour tempered by compassion which is the true mark of heroism, was the stuff of which many tales were spun and then collected to form story cycles. The Simhāsanadvātrimśikā1 (the Thirty-two Tales of the Lion Throne) is one such work.

  In this work, King Bhoja of Dhāra discovered by chance Vikramāditya’s lion throne that for want of a worthy successor had been hidden away after the great monarch met his death in a great battle.2 Bhoja was stopped from ascending the throne by the first of the thirty-two jewelled statuettes that adorned, one at each end, the sixteen golden steps that led up to the gem-studded golden throne. Each of the. thirty-two statuettes told him by turns, a tale illustrating the pre-eminent virtues of the dead monarch. Each tale ended with the same statement: that Bhoja could set foot on the step if he truly regarded himself as a worthy successor to the monarch who had occupied the throne with such rare distinction in the past. King Bhoja stood abashed. According to the frame story in this story cycle, the Thirty-two Tales of the Lion Throne, Bhoja paid homage to the illustrious monarch, long dead, by worshipping the throne with flowers and other articles of adoration. But he never tried to ascend the throne. Now King Bhoja, a historical monarch (1055 CE), was a great ruler, and a good ruler according to history. He was a renowned warrior and conqueror, an accomplished scholar, poet, mathematician and astronomer, with many books to his credit on these subjects and on poetics; a patron of the arts and a great builder. In short he was rather like Vikramāditya himself, that illustrious monarch who had ruled over that same region, Mālava (Malwa), a millennium before the powerful Pāramāra dynasty of Bhoja held sway. Yet, the storytellers of those times made him bow before the earlier monarch, and accept second place. Such was the incomparable greatness of Vikramāditya’s name, and the aura of his immeasurable fame in the popular imagination of that time and of all time. His name was magic.

  The Vikramāditya story-complex is extensive and has continued to be part of the living tradition of storytelling to which it originally belonged, circulating at the level of oral transmission, side by side with the written and then the later printed texts.

  Besides the Thirty-two Tales of the Lion Throne, a cycle of the Vikramāditya tales is to be found in the great Kashmiri work of fiction, the Kathāsaritsāgara (Ocean of Story Streams), composed around 1070 CE, by Somadeva, who is contemporaneous with King Bhoja. This Vikramāditya story cycle is the concluding portion of the Kathāsaritsāgara (vol. 9 Tawney-Penzer).

  The most popular and celebrated of the tales that constitute the Vikramāditya story-complex, however, is the cycle of stories that centre around the encounter of Vikramāditya with a vetāla, a genie. A vetāla is a suprahuman being similar to the djinn, a familiar character that we meet in so many of the tales in the Arabian Nights, for instance, ‘Aladdin and the Lamp’. This extraordinary encounter is the theme of the Vetālapañćavinśatikā, the Five-and-Twenty (Short) Tales of the Genie, or the Vetāla Tales, for short.

  Four main recensions in Sanskrit, of this widely popular kathā, have survived, with known authorship. And numerous versions came into existence in other Indian languages over a long period, the most important of these being the versions in Vrajbhasha, i.e., Old Hindi (the Baitāl Paćīsi); Tamil (the Vedālakkadaigal); and the Marathi version.

  Of the four Sanskrit recensions, two are found as parts of larger wholes, set in a mosaic of colourful tales and story cycles within an over-arching frame, and connected by a continuous narrative. These are the two Kashmiri works of narrative fiction of the eleventh century CE that are vast collections of tales then current in Kashmir: Somadeva’s Kathāsaritsāgara (about 1070 CE), already referred to, and Kṣemendra’s Bṛhatkathāmanjarī (Blossom Sprays of the Great Tale), 1037 CE, composed some twenty years earlier. Both these works are in verse, Somadeva’s being the finer, because he is the better poet, and a skilled storyteller. To these two important works that are justly famous, is owed the preservation of many a fine tale and many a delightful story cycle which otherwise might have been lost forever, a tragedy that has overtaken ancient Indian literary works too often.

  It is believed that the Vetāla Tales was originally an autonomous work and not part of any other large collection of stories. And we do have two recensions, autonomous, of the work. One is by
Śivadāsa in a mix of verse and prose, a literary form known as champu which appears to have been popular in medieval Sanskrit literature. It is possible that the champu is a form derived directly from the oral tradition; from storytelling as distinctive from story writing. For oral narratives are a mixture of narrative and passages of singing, as can be seen from the performances of contemporary artists in the oral tradition. And the sung passages would tend to be in verse. Initially a transitional literary form perhaps when oral narratives were being committed to writing, the mixed form or champu might have been appropriated by later writers as a new literary form. In narrative fiction that uses a mix of verse and prose, the two styles would be employed for different purposes: the prose for narrative, to carry the story-line; the verse for description and commentary, for authorial observations and non-fictional didactic material. This is how Śivadāsa uses the two styles. And we see the same distinctive uses of verse and prose for different purposes in the Panćatantra.