The Fairy Tellers, page 24
But sex, in Somadeva’s collection, also has a dark side. Hence the tale of the witch Kalaratri, who accuses the handsome Sundaraka of attempting to rape her, which leads to him being beaten up by her husband, seeking shelter in a cow-house and being lifted into the skies when Kalaratri and her coven turn up in the cow-house to perform their spells. Lust, Somadeva reminds us, can inspire terrible deeds, and this was a lesson worth preaching when the crown of Kashmir was worn by a sex addict. ‘A prince distracted by unholy passion,’ as the poet wrote, ‘makes no distinction between what is lawful and what is illicit.’
The Bonfire of Suryavati
Having the wrong advisers didn’t help. Among King Kalasha’s coterie was a guru who, the chronicler Kalhana tells us, ‘was indiscriminate in his intercourse with his own daughter’. In a court like Kalasha’s, this was hardly career-damaging. ‘Always knocking about from house to house to steal the embraces of other men’s wives’, Kalasha ‘felt no pleasure in the embraces of his own wives at night’. Men who are at the mercy of their sexual appetites aren’t usually known for their brilliant leadership qualities, and Kalasha’s father was growing restless over his son’s behaviour. It was up to Queen Suryavati to broker the peace.
But Kalasha was too neurotic for a truce. A brief period of calm flared into open conflict when he set fire to Ananta’s infantry, used poison and other artifices to undermine the old king’s defences, and spread malicious rumours to damage his parents’ credibility. He even accused his own mother of being a prostitute. Standing on the terrace of his palace, he watched his father’s property burn on his orders, dancing with joy like a Kashmiri version of the Roman emperor Nero. The conflagration swallowed up most of King Ananta’s wealth, and huts had to be built on the riverbanks to house the royal entourage. Maddened by the destruction, the old king turned on his queen in a fatal confrontation.
‘Have I not lost glory, fame, heroism, kingdom, spirit, sense and wealth by being subjected to the influence of a wife?’ Ananta declared. He was so enraged he even questioned whether Kalasha was his natural son, suggesting there may have been truth in the rumour that the royal baby had died and, in order to protect her status as mother of the heir, Suryavati had secretly installed a lower-born infant. But the queen wasn’t putting up with this kind of slander. ‘You have abused me as an unchaste woman of your family,’ she retorted. ‘Useless and old, driven by your son, as you are, I fear lest people would say that your wife too has forsaken you.’
So lacerating were Suryavati’s words that blood was seen to ooze from the king’s seat – he’d stabbed himself with his sword. ‘Relieved of the tyranny of his wife and son,’ Kalhana tells us, ‘the good king stretched his legs to sleep his long sleep.’
Her riposte may have provoked his suicide, but Suryavati was devoted to Ananta. At the funeral, she proceeded on a chariot, accompanying her husband while the music played. The carriage bearing Ananta’s body was decorated with banners and ‘so bright that it reflected the figures of men who stood round and the hair of the [subject] kings which waved in the air’. Suryavati took ritual water to curse her son’s advisers and made an oath of her innocence against all the accusations that had dogged her. ‘And thus having established her fame she suddenly jumped from her little carriage into the burning fire. And the flames rose and reddened the sky and appeared to the people as if it were painted in a picture.’
Suttee was, by the cultural mores of the time, the honourable way for a queen to go. It’s the much admired fate of several characters in the Ocean, such as the virtuous Queen Dharmavati, who ‘leapt into that burning pyre, with its hair of flame, as gladly as into a cool lake’. After Suryavati had emulated those tales narrated by her court poet, her ashes were carried, along with her husband’s, to be scattered in the Ganges. Their son Kalasha mellowed as the years passed, developing into a wiser ruler, until he was succeeded by his own son Harsha. However, in the combative atmosphere of medieval Kashmir, Harsha would die violently as well, slain in a rebellion by his own lords. A reminder that, in a valley proud of its impermeability, the demons are often within.
As for what happened to the queen’s teller of tales, that’s harder to answer. No less a scholar than Sir Aurel Stein (explorer of Asia and translator of Kalhana’s River of Kings) asked around in the 1880s, and though he made extensive notes of Kashmir’s ancient sites, he found no information about Somadeva. We can only speculate about the poet’s fate, for with the grace of an instinctive storyteller, he left behind nothing other than his tales.
The Tale of the Zombie Who Liked Riddles
For ten years, a mendicant brings fruit to the court of King Trivikramasena. But when a monkey bursts open one of the fruits, a jewel is revealed. Summoned to explain the more than three thousand jewels he’s presented, the mendicant tells the king he needs a hero to help him perform a special incantation. So the king accepts his request: to pull down a corpse from a rosewood tree and transport it to a cemetery in the dead of night.
But when Trivikramasena reaches the tree and throws the corpse over his shoulder, he discovers it is possessed by a vetaal – a zombie-like creature that can animate the dead. This vetaal also happens to be an inveterate teller of stories, each of which ends in a riddle. If the king fails to answer the riddle truthfully, the vetaal will split his head into a hundred pieces.
Amongst the tales narrated by the vetaal, there’s the one about the woman whose husband and brother cut off their heads in a temple and she puts the wrong heads back on the wrong bodies (so who is now her husband?); another about a princess who loses her heart to a condemned thief and throws herself onto his pyre, where he is raised from the dead by Shiva (and why did the thief weep and laugh at the stake?); and another about a man given a magic pill so he can turn into a woman and steal inside the chambers of a princess he rescued from a rampaging elephant (but, given the trickery he has played, is he her rightful husband?).
Each tale ends in a riddle, and at each correct answer, the vetaal disappears. Obliged to retrieve the corpse, the king piggybacks his storytelling cargo through a cycle of twenty-four stories, until the vetaal tells of a king and his son who find an exiled queen and her daughter in a forest. Owing to a mistake about the size of their feet, the king marries the princess and the prince marries the queen. What, asks the vetaal, is the relationship of their children? The king is stumped, and so the vetaal brings the cycle of stories to an end, impressed by his dedication and courage. It leaves the corpse for him to carry to the mendicant, but warns him to be wary of the mendicant’s scheme.
In the cemetery, amongst the shrieking and howling of jackals and vultures, the king lays down the corpse, and the mendicant asks him to prostrate himself. But the king insists the mendicant must show how this is done. After all, he’s a king, how could he possibly know how to bow before others? This gives him his chance, and following the vetaal’s advice, he decapitates the prostrating mendicant. So King Trivikramasena is granted kingship over the sky-roaming vidyadharas after his earthly existence, and his single wish is granted: that ‘these first twenty-four questions and answers, charming with their various tales, and this conclusion, the twenty-fifth of the series, be all famous and honoured on the earth’.
Chapter 18
East Meets West
A search for a magical city after a princess’s riddle, an otherworldly realm where the inhabitants never age or die, men turned into savage beasts, shape-shifting magicians doing battle in the form of different animals: again and again, the Ocean laps at the stories we’ve already met. In most cases, the correspondences are faint, like barely audible rumours whispered between the regions. We detect a strand of a story, a discrete motif, but the versions veer off in different directions. When the hermit’s daughter Kadaligarbha sows mustard seeds on her way through the forest, for example, we’re reminded of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb trail, but Kadaligarbha is leaving the forest, not trapped in it, sowing the seeds so she can find her way back to her father’s hermitage when the king discards her (curiously, in a grisly plot development of false witchcraft accusations that echoes another of Dortchen Wild’s tales, ‘The Six Swans’).
Faint as some of these whispers may be, there are others that speak with remarkable clarity. The volume rises and we can almost hear the synching of the tellers’ voices. Each of the storytellers visited on this trail was narrating stories that featured, in some substantial form, in the Ocean. Take Giambattista Basile’s ‘Five Sons’: it repeats the Ocean’s ‘Three Suitors’, about a group of men who save a beautiful woman from the clutches of a monster (a demonic rakshasa for Somadeva, an ogre for Giambattista). One locates the monster, another transports them to it, another slays it; and all debate who should claim the rescued captive (obviously, neither story alights on the solution of consulting the woman herself). Hanna Dyab told several stories that appear in strikingly close variations in the Ocean, such as ‘The City of Gold’ and a tale about a man who finds himself married to a flesh-eating sorceress, who is turned into a dog but avenges himself by turning her into a mare and regularly beating her. Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve’s tales of men cursed into the form of beasts are anticipated by Somadeva’s many transformations, such as the lion ridden by the beautiful Manovati, whose curse is lifted at a wedding; and the Baroness d’Aulnoy’s female-ruled ‘Isle of Happiness’ offers a timeless paradise comparable to the one depicted in the underwater adventure of Sattvasila, who leaps from a shipwreck to find himself in a kingdom free from age and death, with a beautiful immortal as its queen. There are several overlaps with the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, of which one of the most intricate is the tale ‘Doctor Know-All’, about a charlatan who keeps striking lucky until he’s asked to guess the creature under a covered dish and chastises himself with an old nickname (‘poor Crab!’), which proves as lucky as the Indian version, whose nickname was ‘Frog’. As for Ivan Khudiakov: of several correspondences, one of the most striking is that between his story ‘Ivan Expensive’ and Somadeva’s battling yoginis; in both tales, the power to transform into beasts is used for profit in the marketplace before the duelling sorcerers try to outdo each other with their zoomorphic abilities.
As Wilhelm Grimm wrote in 1811, ‘we may dare to follow the threads spun by old fables, and borne through the world in marvellous shapes and circuits’. There are dozens of other pathways between the Ocean and the stories found in Western and Middle Eastern culture. Many of the animal fables (which form a major portion of the Ocean) reappeared in the fables of La Fontaine in seventeenth-century France, after he’d read a Persian adaptation known as the Fables of Bidpai; while several tales of lusty suitors in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales correspond with the Ocean. The story of the virtuous and beautiful Upakosa, for example, about a young woman left to fend for herself, who tricks a string of high-ranking sex pests into a trunk and then exposes them to the king, smeared humiliatingly in lamp-black, recurs in the Arabic tale ‘The Lady and Her Five Suitors’ (in which the harassers, locked into a cabinet, lose control of their bladders and end up peeing all over each other) and in the eighth day of the Decameron, as well as in numerous other collections, from Straparola’s Facetious Nights to the Norse tale of ‘Mastermaid’; while the plot of Chaucer’s ‘Franklin’s Tale’ echoes one of the king-riding vetaal’s tales, about a merchant’s daughter who repels the sexual predation of her brother’s friend and a thief by making appointments to meet them later, a tale reimagined by Boccaccio in the tenth day of the Decameron, which is probably how Chaucer found it.
It reflects the universality of the themes in Somadeva’s tales that many of them have reappeared in so many different locales. But it also reflects the patterns of movement between human societies. Boccaccio’s tales are narrated by high-born refugees from the Black Death, and there’s something appropriate about this, given that many of the Florentine’s tales followed pathways similar to the trajectories of disease. Like the Yersinia pestis bacteria, carried by rodents, transmitted by fleas, spreading along trade routes between Central Asia and Europe, so travelled the folk tales. Whether for tales or ticks, caravanserais and other wayfarers’ inns were super-spreaders. Which explains why a tale like the one about Upakosa found its way to trading centres like Isfahan in Persia, Egypt and the thriving city-states of Italy, before winding its way north to Holland, England and eventually Iceland.FN1
There’s a pattern here, in which the broader storytelling of the Ocean participates; intersecting more frequently, and in closer detail, with The Thousand and One Nights than it does with the Grimms’ tales, and more with Giambattista Basile’s tales than with the Grimms’. Stories flowed along the routes of caravans and ships, burrowing into their new host societies, adapting to local conditions, reshaped by new storytellers who added their own spin on them and made them their own (see Figure 2).
Although it’s the aim of this book to draw attention to individual fairy tellers, there’s a contraflow in the wider narrative of story distribution. Like the adventuring King Naravahanadatta, famous for his many wives, fantastical tales are too promiscuous to stick with a single partner. They keep moving around, testing themselves in new locales, mixing with different story strands to create hybrid versions that free themselves from their predecessors, washing themselves clean of individual authors’ print marks.
But sometimes the print marks are ineffaceable. Certain stories that we have already encountered, such as ‘Beauty and the Beast’ or ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, are indelibly tattooed with the patterns of the narrators who did so much to fashion them. In Somadeva’s case, however, these signatures are harder to glean. He left behind fewer clues of his storytelling process than any of our other fairy tellers. There are no memoirs, no diaries, no letters, not even other works to compare with his story collection.
On the other hand, he left behind more than any of the other tellers. Because he left behind his tales: three hundred and fifty of them, approximately, which is more than Giambattista Basile, Hanna Dyab, Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, Dortchen Wild and Hans Christian Andersen combined. It is in this sense that we can glimpse Somadeva: a man who admired self-control and abhorred its loss, had little patience for the ostentatiously pious, saw hypocrisy everywhere, hiding in plain sight, and was a stickler for linguistic correctness.FN2 There’s a sly fastidiousness to this poet. I don’t imagine he suffered fools gladly, although he took great delight in mocking them in his tales. Along with a sharp but generous sense of humour, he had a love for storytelling so richly diverse it’s tempting to imagine him as a born raconteur who could never turn off the tap. His philosophy was pluralistic, absorbing stories from many different traditions, retelling them in his own voice. Not only do these stories depict marriage across the caste system, they celebrate the wisdom of nobles who listen to the ordinary people. In one of the riddling vetaal’s tales, the prince’s friend is able to translate the signs of the prince’s beloved, ‘because I keep in touch with the common people’, and the lesson is repeated at the end of the same tale, when the vetaal pins the blame on the king, for failing to uncover ‘what the common people are saying’. In his own subtle way, Somadeva was offering his patrons lessons that, on political as well as moral grounds, they would have done well to heed.
‘The stories are travelling,’ says the writer Gayathri Prabhu, ‘and in travelling stories change. It feels like an ocean because it feels boundless. I do think Somadeva is somebody who deeply loved a good story.’ This, above all else, is the Somadeva we can pin down: graceful in his art but garrulous in his storytelling and the multiple personas he was able to adopt. A man who took stories that others had narrated before him, and spun them through his own keen-eyed, sharp-witted filter. A man who crumbled his life into his tales so that, in the end, that’s what he became: a man made out of story.
The Ocean may begin with a story narrated by Shiva and the adventures of his divine attendants, but in the final book we are listening to stories from a gambler, a hermit in the forest, an impoverished Brahmin who accidentally married a flesh-eating demon, a youthful seller of bedsteads. Slyly, Somadeva pulls his queen down from the lofty goings-on of the heavens to the grubbier antics on earth, and shows her the many voices of the people around her. Because everybody can tell a story, the Ocean insists, and everybody can listen to one. Stories take us away from the muck of mortal existence – literally, in the case of Gunadhya, and the many other characters who use their stories to release themselves from their curses; just as Somadeva’s storytelling was intended to lift Queen Suryavati away from the anxieties of King Kalasha’s chaotic reign; and some form of this salvation is pledged for all the collection’s readers. ‘Whoever reads this tale that issued from my mouth,’ declares Shiva, in Somadeva’s verses, ‘and whoever listens to it with attention, and whoever possesses it, shall soon be released from sins, and triumphantly attain the condition of a splendid vidyadhara, and enter my everlasting world.’
Listen to the stories and you’ll roam the skies as an immortal. We do this whenever we hear them, carried into the Hindu mythosphere by Somadeva’s narrative, but of course he’s talking about something else. Through the physical act of listening and reading, we gain the grace of moksha, salvation. Storytelling won’t just allow us to imagine the paradise of the immortals – it will take us there.
