by Sivadasa
Since no two of the four main recensions of the Vetāla Tales are identical, and since the much later Old Hindi and Tamil versions are also not identical either with each other or with any of the four Sanskrit recensions, it is not in any doubt that they all derive, each from a separate, individual version, oral or written. The two Kashmiri recensions probably had the same parent, namely, some work of fiction or collection of tales current in tenth century Kashmir. But the Śivadāsa recension is clearly divergent, as are the Hindi-Tamil versions. All of the parent versions from which the extant recensions are derived appear to be lost.
It is in the frame stories of the four Sanskrit recensions and the Tamil-Hindi versions of the Vetāla Tales that the differences are mainly present. Many of the stories set within the frame are common and reasons for this have already been indicated. But an important fact to bear in mind is that though the paraphrasable contents of the tales might be the same, the stories themselves are told differently; and how a story is told is as important as the story itself. On the other hand, the differences in the frame stories are highly significant because the frame story defines the tone of the work as a whole and conveys the vision that directs and orders the narrative. And in the Śivadāsa text the preamble and frame story which together form a kind of prologue, the kathāmukha, are crucial in determining the tone and structure of the work, and in conveying the specific vision of the author. This prologue to his text is the most compelling in its role as a framing-device, compared to the prologues in the other versions of the Vetāla Tales. It is a prologue that is problematic and teases the modern reader into thought. Śivadāsa succeeds in doing this by first introducing a tale of the hero Vikramāditya’s father and the strange events surrounding the birth of the hero himself that is not found in any other frame story in the other extant recensions of the Vetāla Tales, nor in the Hindi-Tamil versions of a later date. And he follows this up by suggesting through structure and language the significance in the text, of an ordeal-cum-test that the hero has to face and undergo successfully before he can fulfil the great destiny that has been foretold for him in the prologue. Because of its crucial importance in the structure of the text, the prologue will be discussed later in some detail. But at this point the identity of the hero, Vikramāditya, has to be examined first.
II
The hero of the Vetāla Tales goes under several names: Vikramasena (the king whose armies strode forth victorious); Trivikramasena (whose armies strode the earth three times victorious); Vikramakesarī (The Lion of Valour: Kesarī–lion); Vikramānka (marked out by valour: anka–mark); and Vikramāditya (vikrama + āditya = the Sun of Valour). (The term Vikrama, that is part of all these names, signifies valour, heroism, and the act of striding forth.) The last name, Vikramāditya, is the one that is generally found to be employed in history and legend. Āditya, as one of the many names for the sun, brings in solar association and gives the monarch solar attributes. Vikramāditya is the monarch who blazes like the sun, sustaining as well as destroying. He strides forth in glory in the world like the sun wheeling through space, illuminating the whole world. He is the centre and ruler of the world, just as the sun is the ruler of the universe, and his wheel of glory and justice, like the sun’s disc, rolls over the entire earth as the ancient Indians knew it. Rich with all these resonances, the name Vikramāditya, first the given name for a particular monarch, was later assumed by other monarchs in India as a title. And in adopting this title they appropriated the glory and fame of the original possessor of the name. Who was this monarch is the question that has to be asked now.
Who was Vikramāditya? Was he a historical king? Tradition asserts that he was. Many historians argue that he was not and produce half-a-dozen kings who went by that name or adopted it as a title in history. Having done that they finally settle upon Chandragupta Vikramāditya (fourth century CE), the greatest of the Gupta emperors as the real monarch, the Vikramāditya of story and legend.
However, tradition should not be summarily dismissed, as is too often done in discussing problems of dates and data in ancient Indian history, as so much story or legend. Legend, it is true, often surrounds the name and fame of certain historical personages; great monarchs and saints and poets. Legends too often have a basis, however slender, in actual facts and events of history. And it cannot be denied that there is some story in history; some attempts to mythologize important figures, create legends around them and build images of them, even in our own age that prides itself on its factual objectivity and accuracy in recording events. Tradition asserts that there was a monarch by the name of Vikramāditya. ruler of a vast and powerful kingdom, who lived at the close of the first millennium BCE and whose capital was Ujjayinī; that he was a most illustrious and noble king, just, accomplished, a great warrior and munificent patron of the arts, in short, the embodiment of the very ideal of kingship; that he routed the Śaka invaders, pushed them out and established the Vikrama era in 57 BCE to commemmorate the victory. But most scholars deny this monarch any historicity. Indeed, they relegate him totally to the realm of legend and romance. Since the historicity of this remarkable ruler is in question and as it can neither be proved nor disproved that he was a real monarch, we could perforce be content to regard him as, at best, a quasi-historical figure, like King Arthur of the Round Table or the Charlemagne of story and song and leave it at that. But this is not a very satisfactory way of dealing with the Vikramāditya-problem. An alternative might be suggested. In all probability, the monarch Vikramāditya of tradition, of story and legend, is a composite figure made up of the lives and exploits of more than one historical ruler who was outstanding in one respect or another. Several remarkable monarchs might have come together in the popular imagination and fused into one extraordinary person, an ideal and symbol of the Indian concept of a perfect sovereign. Certain facts support this suggestion. In the Śivadāsa recension of the Vetāla Tales, the frame story is located in Pratiṣṭhāna, a great capital of the ancient world situated on the banks of the Godāvari. The prince born in that city is named Vikramāditya; he is the hero of the Vetāla Tales. Pratiṣṭhānapura is modern Paithan in Maharashtra, now famous for its exquisitely woven silk saris, but all its past glory has vanished. However, in the Vikramāditya story cyle that forms the concluding portion of the Kathāsaritsāgara, the hero is the ruler of Mālava at Ujjayinī.
As noted already, Vikramāditya is known under several names in the Vetāla-texts. Might it be possible that this rather casual way of using many names for the one hero of the Vetāla Tales reflects a successive superimposition of the image of several monarchs one after the other on all the rulers who appropriated the name of the original monarch, Vikramāditya, king of the Mālavas? This would produce an amalgam of several notable rulers and of their eminent virtues and their exploits, and present us with a composite figure. As the original tales, or the early form of the Vetāla Tales as we now have it, travelled from place to place and from one royal court to another in the early days of its peregrinations, could it be that the tales relating to a particular monarch, a great and noble warrior perhaps, were appropriated with all its associations of adventure and glory by bards and storytellers and attached to the name and fame of their own king whom they served and whose deeds real and imaginary they celebrated in story and song? We might speculate endlessly after this fashion but the probability that something like this did actually take place is high.
It seems very likely that there was an actual historical king named Vikramāditya at the close of the first millennium BCE, who was a ruler of the Mālavas. He might very well have been an exemplary king in many respects. There certainly was a regnal era known as the Mālava era, which might be the same era as the Vikrama era believed to have been established by the emperor Vikramāditya in 57 BCE. This same monarch is in tradition credited with having fought the invading Śakas (Scythians), routed them and pushed them out of the Mālava region. The difficulty, however, that faces us here is that this King Vikramāditya reign
ed at Ujjayinī, on the banks of the river Śiprā, a tributary of the great Narmadā, whereas our King Vikramāditya of the Vetāla Tales in this volume reigned, after the death of his father, Gandharvasena, at Pratiṣṭhānapura, on the banks of the river Godāvarī, which is a long distance from the Narmadā valley.
So much for the riddle of the great hero, Vikramāditya, the king with many names, celebrated for his many noble virtues and kingly qualities and for many a heroic deed. Who is the real Vikramāditya? We may never know. As far as the hero in the world of the text is concerned, he has to be viewed as the fabled monarch who ruled over the whole earth wisely and well and afterwards became King of the Vidyādharas11 in their fabled kingdom. While kings whose dates we know for certain, crumbled into dust and are just names in the pages of history, this king who reigns supreme as he has for a couple of millennia in the land of the imagination, is immortal. And now we proceed to examine the structure of works in which his name and fame are enshrined.
III
The structural pattern characteristic of many works of fiction in India consists of a frame story with a number of stories set within the frame and a continuous narrative running through the whole work. This pattern that I shall define as the frame-emboxment structure might be more, or less complex and complicated, but it is the basic pattern created and established very early in Indian literature by the genius of Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata (circa 800 BCE). It is followed by later writers of fiction, Viṣṇu Śarma (the Panćatantra), Bāṇa (Kādambarī), Daṇḍin (Tales of the Ten Princes), Somadeva (Kathāsaritsāgara) and others whose works have fewer complications and therefore less complexity as, for example the author of the Sukasaptati.
Vyāsa carried the frame-emboxment device to its farthest limits, to compose a multi-dimensional, layered text in the great Mahābhārata saga whose structure he further complicated by bringing in several individual story-cycles, introducing many kinds of non-fictional material and weaving it all together into the fabric of the main narrative, the Bhārata War. Vyāsa’s great text has no second, although it is paralleled in accomplishment in a much more limited but compact manner in the Panćatantra.
With its multiple levels of narration (and modes of narration as well), each set in its individual frame, a sub-frame, and the whole set within the over-arching double frame; with its plurality of narrators, each with his/her own audience, and functioning within the sub-frame, yet related to other narrations and to the central narrative, this was a literary form that offered unlimited opportunities and scope for the writing of fiction. What Vyāsa succeeded in creating was a literary form quite revolutionary in the craft of fiction; a unique form; a new genre which might be viewed and discussed as novelistic. In the Mahābhārata saga12 (and I am mainly referring to a text that can be predicated hypothetically as Vyāsa’s text, minus the later accretions, namely, the huge chunks of didactic and philosophical material, the Anuśāsana Parva mainly), Vyāsa has at his command an array of literary devices that he uses with superb artistry: flashbacks’, prophecies, the curse, recollection (remembrance or smaraṇa) and recognition. These devices serve to effect a fusion of time; to bring time past and time future into the present moment. There are also other devices that Vyāsa employs: metamorphosis, confusion of identity and so on. The employment of these devices extends the range of imaginative responses and opens windows into worlds of aesthetic experience that a simple narration could hardly hope to achieve. Later writers who inherited this unique form had at their command a flexible mode of narration which would enable them to set themselves goals other than mere storytelling for entertainment, which no doubt is a legitimate and valid aim, but one that leaves much to be desired.
The two autonomous recensions of the Vetāla Tales, of Śivadāsa and Jambhaladatta follow a simplified form of the classic pattern outlined already. There is the frame story and twenty-four (twenty-five in the Jambhaladatta recension) stories, and the continuous narrative. Three characters only are employed: the hero, the villain and the genie, the vetāla who combines in himself the roles of narrator and actor. This is a far cry from the multivocal texts of Vyāsa and Visnu Śarma where the large number of characters provide multiple points of view. The goals of our two authors of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries are different and limited. Jambhaladatta gives us a text that aims at straightforward, uncomplicated storytelling for the sheer joy of telling a good tale as best as the storyteller can and the reader’s delight at reading a good tale well told for the most part. Jambhaladatta’s narrative is at times written in a somewhat pedestrian prose and lacks depth. Śivadāsa’s text, on the other hand is a finer text; a deeply thoughtful text. It is a text that is troubled at times, burdened by an awareness of the presence of wrongdoing, even evil in the stark sense of the term, and of subsequent moral retribution. There is a strong sense of the ways, often strange and inscrutable, in which these two constants in the order of existence interact to determine human action. The text rehearses the inexorable march of events to its bitter end on a course set in motion by an initial act that on the surface appears to be trifling but, in fact, turns out to be tragic in nature and brings a set of bizarre happenings in its wake. This rather trifling act is the petty revenge that King Gandharvasena, in a moment of pique, wreaks on an unoffending ascetic sitting in silent penance in the forest. The king’s action, flowing out of inordinate pride, is an act of wrongdoing unworthy of a virtuous and responsible monarch. It sows the seed of evil. Order is broken; disorder enters. Innocent blood is shed in a gruesome manner and the unnatural act of a father (the ascetic) killing his own little son blazes a trail of evil, of foul murder and deeply-laid plots to commit more ‘foul murder’, practise deception and villainy, until finally the evil is extinguished by another killing, which is a ritual slaying. Blood pays for blood. Blood washes away blood. And a new dawn sees the re-establishment of order and harmony. The righteous age of Vikramāditya is ushered in. But, it is not all that simple and straightforward, as will be demonstrated in the following paragraphs.
Śivadāsa’s text is problematic. It raises issues, poses problems. It hangs the hero, Vikramāditya, on the horns of vexing dilemmas. Questions trouble the readers (and, one suspects, the author himself) as they ponder over imponderables, and tease them into thought. For instance, if we consider the strange events surrounding the birth of our hero, we have first a child killed by its own father; then its triply-fragmented frame produces conception in three women in three different places, somehow. But how? The reader trying to figure out this macabre situation savours the fascination of being in a state of uncertainty. He is more than perplexed. He is haunted and senses depths of meaning that he cannot quite get a handle on. However, it is the very essence of folk and fairy tales to present inexplicable situations and suggest rather than state.
Śivadāsa’s strong sense of wrongdoing and the subsequent moral retribution is the imperative that dictates his handling of the inherited story material. He re-shapes the received text, driven by his moral concerns and literary objectives. And we see this in the manner in which he structures his narrative; and in the language in the gnomic verse, and in two specific passages of description (p. 13 and pp. 17–19).
A couple of examples from the text to illustrate the issues that Śivadāsa raises and the dilemmas he places his hero in, should be useful.
The most important element in the structure of the narrative is the preamble (or prologue) that forms the story of Vikramāditya’s father and the ascetic Valkalāśana. This story that rehearses events in the past before the hero, King Vikramāditya, and the villain, the yogi, Kṣāntaśīla are born is not found in the other three recensions of the Vetāla Tales. Where Śivadāsa found this particular tale is something that we cannot even begin to speculate about. But that he saw the possibilities latent in the Gandharvasena-Valkalāśana tale is evidence of his artistic sense and his vision. He has seized upon the possibilities contained in the material of this particular story and made skilful use of it
to convey his sense of evil and moral retribution; his view of kingship with its conflicting duties and responsibilities; his aesthetic concerns to suggest avenues of exploration of certain elements in the narrative structure, not ethically and philosophically, but imaginatively. For example, the nature of the strange bonds that link the three characters in the text, hero, villain and vetāla, and establish certain relationships; the special status awarded to the question-answer passages at the end of each tale; the significance that the text reveals to the reader of the genie’s disappearing act and the hero’s repeated return to the tree, both of which enclose each tale, setting apart the storybook-world from the necromancing Kṣāntiśīla’s demonic world.
Śivadāsa places the story of the king and the ascetic right at the beginning whereby it gains a special status and crucial importance. The frame story always has the effect of defining the tone of the work as a whole. In this case, Śivadāsa has the story of the ascetic and King Gandharvasena in addition to the frame story which is a normal part of the text in a frame-emboxment-structure. Together they have enormous significance. The effect is particularly evident in the question-answer passage at the end of each tale which seen in the light of the prologue (the preamble and frame story) takes on meaning and purpose to serve as more than a link in the narrative structure providing the raison d’être to tell yet another tale. Instead of being a mechanical device it becomes an integral part of the structure. Further, in Śivadāsa’s hands, it functions as the vehicle to convey an important aspect of his vision. These passages (the question-answer passage and the authorial interventions at the beginning and end of each tale) are employed to indicate and formulate a test and an ordeal that the hero is subjected to, as it will become evident in the final sections of the introduction.