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

by Sivadasa

  The other autonomous text of the Vetāla Tales is by Jambhaladatta which is wholly in prose with a verse or two thrown in here and there. None of Jambhaladatta’s verses, except for the opening ones, have any merit.

  However, something of historic interest leaps up from the opening page of Jambhaladatta’s text to arrest the reader’s attention. In the second introductory verse, he writes:

  Having heard these tales of the genie, five-and-twenty,

  filled with fine flavours, from Varadeva’s lotus mouth

  —he who was Minister for Peace and War—

  Jambhaladatta in reverence for his preceptor,

  has set them down in words few but fitting,

  in order that these tales so fabulous

  would always live preserved in men’s memories.

  [Emphasis mine]

  At some point in the course of oral transmission, works of narrative fiction, the kathā, would have been committed to writing giving rise to several versions, or recensions. Lines 6-7 of the above quotation provide one of the main incentives to do so for they imply that already in the medieval period (the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries CE) ‘oral expressions’ might have been in danger of being lost. Dates, provenance, authorship and such data are almost impossible to come by in the case of oral texts and rarely do we get to witness the transition of an oral text to a written one. Yet, this is precisely what we see happening right before our eyes, here, in the above quoted verse. Jambhaladatta having heard the Vetāla Tales has written them down so that they are not lost to posterity. The verse also indicates another characteristic of oral storytelling. The texts are passed on from preceptor to pupil, by word of mouth.

  Unfortunately, there is no clue to the dates of these two men, Varadeva, the storyteller and his pupil, Jambhaladatta, the story writer. Nothing but their names and the fact that they were Ministers for Peace and War, or Foreign Ministers, are given. Jambhaladatta signs himself in the colophon of his text as Minister for Peace and War. But in which kingdom in medieval India of the many kingdoms large and small, weak or powerful, they served as ministers and whether one succeeded the other in the same high post, are facts that will never be known.

  A fifth recension extant is of little consequence, being merely a text that closely follows the versions of the Vetāla Tales in the two Kashmiri works of fiction already referred to, of Somadeva Bhatta and Kṣemendra.

  The four main recensions of the Vetāla Tales noted already are of a comparatively late date. They belong to medieval literature of the period of the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries CE, and have been ‘set down’, i.e., committed to writing, during this period by the four authors whose names appear in the manuscripts in the introductory verses and/or colophon, or at the end of each tale, as in the Śivadāsa text. But the stories themselves are much, much older. They go far back in time. For storytelling in India is indeed an ancient art, and a very sophisticated and polished art at that. Like other well-known works of fiction, the kathā, such as the Jātaka Tales,3 the Śukasaptati4 and that best known, best loved, and most celebrated of them all, the inimitable Panćantantra,5 the Vetāla Tales belonged originally to the rich, age-old oral literature of the country. The poet and playwright, Kālidāsa, who is placed either in the first century BCE, or the fourth century CE—for such is the state of uncertainty in the matter of dates of ancient Indian authors and texts—refers in his beautiful poem Meghadūtam to ‘village-elders’ in Avanti who are ‘well-versed in the Udayana-tales’ (v.32), and again to ‘skilled storytellers’, in Ujjayinī, ‘recounting old tales’ to ‘entertain their visiting kin’ (v.33a). Incidentally, Udayana is the hero of the first part of the Kathāsaritsāgara; Book II contains Udayana-tales, tales of his life and loves (Vol. I Tawney-Penzer).

  The Mahābhārata, a veritable treasure house of stories, is the earliest surviving work of narrative fiction, besides being much else, for it is a multi-faceted, encyclopaedic text as it has come down to us. We find stories that are often taken out of the Mahābhārata used by later writers, playwrights and writers of fiction.6 It is a text that has suffered much heavy editing during its long course of oral transmission with many additions and revisions made to it but in its initial form of articulation as an oral text without all the accretions that it has acquired over many centuries, the Mahābhārata has to be placed in the first quarter of the first millennium BCE, the period that might be characterized as the Heroic Age with its distinctive socio-political structures, economy and values. The text as we have it today probably began taking shape a few centuries later, possibly around the fifth century BCE, to continue to grow and evolve over a long stretch of time.

  Certain stories are also common to more than one, if not several works of fiction and not necessarily taken out of the Mahābhārata. They are told differently, placed in different contexts, put to different uses and present slight variations in detail.7 This points to a common source. Presumably, stories that were part of the vast repertory of storytelling, as distinct from story writing, once formed a body of floating tales that was the common heritage of ancient communities: tales of love and war, romance and high adventure, of magic, the marvellous and horrific; beast fables, moral tales, humorous folk tales; tales of mighty deeds of heroism, loyalty and sacrifice. The Mahābhārata also mentions another group of tales that were current: ‘the celestial tales, the tales told of devas and asuras’ and ‘the stories of men, Nāgas and Gandharvas’ (the Mahābhārata I.4.1-4). It should be noted that here the sage Śaunaka, head of the hermitage in the Naimiṣa Forest distinguishes the ‘three worlds’ with their inhabitants, of ancient Indian cosmography.

  Like the mighty ocean into which rivers and streams from many places and from many directions flow constantly adding to its store of waters, so also, the vast repertory of stories would have been constantly added to, as new tales were brought by travellers of all sorts returning home: sailors, soldiers, merchants, pilgrims all reporting strange sights and stranger happenings. Tale 8, for instance, in the Śivadāsa text suggests just such a possibility. The use of the image of the ocean and rivers flowing into it, might be noted in the title that Somadeva has given to his great work of fiction—Kathāsaritsāgara (story-stream-ocean).

  These ancient tales would have been told and re-told countless times for entertainment and edification. And in the course of oral transmission, the tales would inevitably have been revised, changed in many ways; minor changes as in changes of locale, names of places and persons, and slight variations in narrative detail; major changes, such as changes in tone and orientation, aims and purposes as well.

  Storytelling is an eminently portable art, with few, minimal props: a drum, a stringed instrument and a side-kick. Any place functions as its theatre: temples and palaces, fair grounds and marketplaces, sacred fords and forest retreats and often the shade of the banyan tree in a village. But the audiences are always different. And ‘skilled storytellers’ feel the pulse of their audience and revise with a keen eye to relevance and contemporary appeal. A storyteller has the advantage of getting a feedback, an immediate response so that he can improvise on the spur of the moment. And he does. Narrator and creator, he combines continuity with freshness, bringing the spice of novelty into a well-worn tale to give it a new lease of life. That itinerant storytellers or narrators (kāthakas) and bards (sūtas) carried around the narratives they had inherited, having learnt them by rote from parent or preceptor (the Sanskrit term guru signifies both); that certain versions of tales were passed down the generations from father to son in certain families of kāthakas and sūtas, or in the succession of preceptor-pupil (guru-śiṣya-paramparā); that skilled narrators revised the inherited material; all this is patently clear from certain passages in the opening chapters of the Mahābhārata [1.1.10-12; 1.5.1-7; 1.13.5-7; 1.53.27-33].

  The frame story of the Mahābhārata is set in the hermitage of Śaunaka, in the Naimiṣa Forest. The narrator is the sūta Ugraśravas, who is in the direct line of success
ion of preceptor/parent/pupil of the ancient narrators of this great saga that is ‘the tale of the tribe’, the tale of the celebrated tribe of Bhāratas of the Vedic Age. Vyāsa is its first narrator/author, as we know it. It is of interest to note that the sage Śaunaka, kulapati (head) of the hermitage and spokesman for the audience of sages, makes a request from time to time to the narrator asking him to tell them a particular tale, or an account of a special lineage of kings and sages or an episode of interest to the audience. He makes a point as well of instructing the narrator to ‘tell’ a tale exactly as his father had narrated it to him, and exactly as his father had narrated it before them, the sages of the Naimiṣa Forest, in the past. No changes please, seems to be the concern of this audience. The implication is clearly that bards/narrators often revised the narratives.

  It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the stories comprising the Vetāla Tales, or any other work of narrative fiction for that matter, were not invented by the authors under whose names the texts appeared at a later date. The stories are old; they have been re-used. The story material is ancient, inherited; it is re-worked, re-shaped, re-organized and re-articulated. Therefore there is the existence of several recensions of one ‘original’ text, if one can speak in terms of an ‘original’, and its derived versions in the case of oral literature.

  Somadeva, who has included in his work a version of the Vetāla Tales in its entirety, presumably the version that was current in Kashmir before his time, states in the preamble (kathāmukha) of the Kathāsaritsāgara that he was only presenting in his work, the essential Bṛhatkathā (The Great Tale), an ancient work of fiction consisting of thousands of stories that had been lost (Kathāsaritsāgara 1.1.3). He adds that his book is modelled precisely on the lost work without any deviation; that he has only tightened the narrative and rearranged the contents so as to preserve the cohesion and intrinsic logic of the tales, ‘as far as possible’; and that he has only given to the work the words that were needed to do all this [emphasis mine]. What Somadeva is virtually saying here is that his work, the Kathāsaritsāgara, is a re-telling of this ancient work of fiction, Guṇāḍhya’s Bṛhatkathā (circa 200 BCE, or the beginning of the first millennium CE).

  The Bṛhatkathā seems in some strange way to have disappeared from the canon sometime towards the close of the first millennium CE. It is referred to in terms of the highest praise in the works of seventh century writers: poets, writers of fiction, poeticians—Bāṇa, Daṇḍin and others8—who view the work canonically and accord its author, Guṇāḍhya, a status similar to or even equal to that of Vyāsa and Vālmīki, authors of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. References to the Bṛhatkathā are also found in Kampuchean stone inscriptions of the ninth century.

  Tradition has a way of creating legends round ancient authors and their works; and to account for the loss of the Bṛhatkathā, tradition has provided one. Guṇāḍhya, the court poet of the Śātavāhana emperor,9 angered by his royal master’s curt rejection of his magnum opus (the Bṛhatkathā) that he had written during his self-imposed exile in the Vindhyan forests, with his own blood for he had no ink, left the court, and in a moment of hurt pride started burning the leaves on which he had written his book. Fortunately, the emperor relented and sent for him; and Guṇāḍhya was stopped before he had completely destroyed his work. But only a small portion of it, about a seventh, could be salvaged and retrieved.

  Presumably, Somadeva used this truncated Bṛhatkathā, the Kashmiri version current in his time, re-shaping, re-organizing, re-articulating the ancient fragment. It is to be strongly doubted that the Vetāla Tales, which is included in its entirety in Somadeva’s great work (vols. 6, 7, Tawney-Penzer, Kathāsaritsāgara), ever formed part of the ‘original’ Bṛhatkathā of Guṇāḍhya, or whether any of the Vikramāditya stories that are found in the Kathāsaritsāgara (vol. 9. Tawney-Penzer Kathāsaritsāgara) belonged to it either. It is probable that the Vetāla Tales were tacked on to the Kashmiri Bṛhatkathā before Somadeva’s time. Their origin has to be sought elsewhere, for it is most unlikely that Kashmir was the provenance of the ‘original’ Bṛhatkathā, or of the Vikramāditya story corpus and the Vetāla Tales, for that matter. The Guṇāḍhya legends and tradition place the Bṛhatkathā and its author in the Deccan. Guṇāḍhya, according to tradition, was the court poet of the Śātavāhana emperor. The Śātavāhana Empire (circa 200 BCE-300 CE) was a southern empire which at the height of its power controlled the entire peninsula, barring the traditional Chola county in the deep south, and extended up to Ujjayinī (Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh). Both the Vetāla Tales and the Bṛhatkathā in its Kashmiri versions locate their frame stories in Pratiṣṭhāna on the Godāvarā, the Śātavāhana capital (modern Paithan, near Aurangabad) in the western Deccan. These narratives appear to have migrated a long way from home to Kashmir, carried by itinerant storytellers, and subjected to changes in the process of transmission.

  Working from the premise that it is highly unlikely that the Vetāla Tales ever formed part of the lost Bṛhatkathā in its original form, it is not in any doubt that the Ur-Vetāla Tales of some ancient, anonymous storyteller, is lost. All that we have are recensions of this ‘original’ narrative, long vanished, almost a millennium later. The recensions are re-tellings at several removes. Given its protean character that compels a narrative that originates in the oral tradition of storytelling to revise itself continuously, thereby constantly renewing itself, it is a forlorn hope, indeed, that sets out to seek and find its ‘absolute beginnings’. What has survived is the re-telling; a re-telling that is one of a series of re-tellings that is also lost.

  In this connection it is interesting and illuminating to refer to the frame story in the Tamil version of the Vetāla Tales which places the ultimate origins of storytelling using a legend, in a world, beyond the world where the ultimate ground of creation, Śiva, abides.

  From a conversation of Indra, Lord of the Immortals and the sage Nārada, a courier par excellence and messenger of sorts, we learn that the lord Śiva, narrated the tales of Vikramāditya and the vetāla in private on Kailāsa’s peak in the Himalayas, the temporal abode of the divine, to his consort Pārvatī, the Mother of the Universe, who had requested the lord to tell her tales ‘never told before’. A certain Brāhmaṇa overheard the narration (how he got there and secured a secret hiding place to listen is not told) but coming down to earth (?), he retailed the very same tales as told by the lord Śiva, to his own wife. Thus what was exclusive and private became public ‘intellectual property’, gaining common knowledge. Śiva, learning of this transgression of the Brāhmaṇa, cursed the unfortunate man to become a vetāla. Transported to a wilderness, the Brāhmaṇa-vetāla had to inhabit a corpse hanging on the branch of a murunga tree. However, when the Brāhmaṇa, contrite, pleaded for release, Śiva set a term to the curse saying that he would be freed from the curse when whosoever he told the tales to, listened to them and answered the questions that he as a Vetāla would ask the listener. One among the several purposes of the question-answer exercise that concludes each tale in the Vetāla Tales is thus indicated, though neither of the autonomous texts of the Vetāla Tales, Śivadāsa’s and Jambhaladatta’s, include the curse.

  By positing such a hoary antiquity to storytelling and projecting it far back in time to the quasi-eternal and temporal abode of divinity, and by making the divine pair Śiva and Śakti (Parvati) as the primal narrator and audience, tradition is pointing to a very ancient and undateable origin for it. This apocryphal story underlines what is central to the genre of oral storytelling, and defines its special nature. Storytelling is timeless. Like fire it is brought down to earth for man’s use and entertainment. A narrative is a re-telling and will always be that. However far back in time it is traced to it always remains a re-telling. We are still left, not with an ‘original’, not with ‘absolute beginnings’ of a narrative, of any. narrative, but with successive re-tellings, the one in this volume of the Vetāla Tales being the last for the
moment, in another language, to new audiences. To place the initial, the original narration on Mt. Kailāsa, in the divine world of the timeless, is simply to state this ineluctable fact in a mythic form.

  Since nothing exists before the earliest recensions of the Vetāla Tales which form part of the eleventh century Kashmiri works, we cannot even begin to predicate a point in time when the parent text from which the Śivadāsa recension derives, was current; or the versions, oral or written, from which the Tamil and Old Hindi versions derive. At one time, several versions, oral and/or written, of such a widely popular work of fiction as the Vetāla Tales would have been current in different parts of the country. In the case of the Panćatantra no fewer than twenty-five recensions10 have survived, no two versions identical. However, most of the Vetāla-Talerecensions appear to have been lost.

  An oral narrative is like the banyan tree, a tree so distinctive a feature of the Indian landscape; a tree that sends down vital, aerial roots to push themselves deeply into the surrounding soil, take root firmly and put out fresh shoots. In decades and centuries, a whole banyan-tree-complex comes into existence. No two of the siblings are identical and none quite like the parent. Yet, there are unmistakably recognizable similarities. So it is with oral texts.