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

by Sivadasa

  The prophecy comes true in its own way; for all prophecies are confusing; they are riddling. They betray those who pin their faith and hopes on them. Vikramāditya, the prince, the head of the dismembered child, becomes the paramount ruler over the whole wide earth. But until the last page in Śivadāsa’s text is turned, the brooding sense of impending danger in the form of Kṣāntiśīla, the yogi, and the presence of the evil that was the consequence of the initial shedding of innocent blood, persist as undercurrents beneath the narrative structure. Twenty-four tales, many delightful and happy, some a trifle sad, a few grisly or bawdy are told, as King Vikramāditya walks back and forth through the cremation grounds carrying a corpse. A significant feature of the Vetāla Tales is that the tales are narrated in the cremation grounds, a place of dissolution; a place that marks the passage from one life to another and from one world to another. His education is completed by the experience of carrying out a dangerous and life-threatening mission successfully. In a deeper sense, he is ‘initiated’ He is born again.

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  Vikramāditya is told twenty-four tales, each of which concludes with a question which he has to answer. This question-answer format is an unusual feature of the Vikramāditya corpus being found in all the extant recensions of the Vetāla Tales and in the Thirty-Two Tales of the Lion Throne, as well.

  ‘Now tell me, O, king…’ is the vetāla’s inevitable refrain. The vetāla concludes his telling of a tale with a question that demands an answer. Invariably, he creates in each tale a situation that raises a question, poses a problem or riddle. The riddle has to be unriddled, the problem solved, an awkward set of circumstances sorted out properly, a question has to be answered. The initial condition that the vetāla lays down when the lets himself be carted along by Vikramāditya is that if he has the answer, the king should unfailingly provide it. If he knowingly refrains from providing the answer or the solution demanded by his interlocutor, his (the king’s) heart would crack and he would die. Incidentally, this motif of the heart cracking or the head shivering to bits is a form of curse found in Indian literature from vedic times.

  Now, Kṣāntiśīla had already warned the king about such an event taking place and instructed him to observe complete silence, whatever the vetāla might or might not say (p. 16). ‘If you speak, the corpse will return to that tree’; and ‘… bring it here quickly in complete silence disregarding what the corpse might say to you; for it will utter many clever deceitful words,’ warns Kṣāntiśīla. On the other hand the vetāla’s initial condition looms large as a curse before the king; it is certain death to break his agreement with the vetāla. And more than that, to break his promise to the vetāla is to be guilty of lying and cheating, a most dishonourable way of behaviour in a great king. A monarch such as the celebrated emperor, Vikramāditya, would rather lose his life than his honour. Further, if he did not keep his word to the vetāla, he could not possibly carry it to Kṣāntiśīla’s presence and in that case, the king would be guilty of not keeping his promise to the necromancer. And if he did he would also be facing certain death, for as we learn later at the conclusion, Kṣāntiśīla was planning to make the king the human sacrifice in the Rite of the Corpse. This gruesome rite, the crowning act we presume of Kṣāntiśīla’s long years of study and mastery of the arts of magic (the text does not mention this fact in so many words) would get him the long desired prize, the possession of the eight Siddhis. The Siddhis are, literally, Perfections. But in the esoteric arts of white and black magic (Tāla and Vetāla) they are the suprahuman powers that Kṣāntiśīla himself lists in the frame story (pp.15-16). The most important (to Kṣāntiśīla at least) is the last power listed, which is lordship, supremacy over the earth. And it is the most menacing to Vikramāditya and more importantly to the world. If Kṣāntiśīla were to succeed, the world would be ruled by an evil man who would institute a demonic order. This is the most important dilemma that the hero faces. There are two sets of imperatives, both binding. Which one is he to choose to follow?

  For Vikramāditya, it is a no-win situation. ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ sums up the nature of the dangerous quandary that the king appears to have placed himself in because of his rash, though magnanimous, gesture to a total stranger who has come from nowhere as a suppliant to make a strange request. However, Vikramāditya was a monarch who was magnanimous to a fault. At least, this is the prevailing image of the monarch. It is also a part of the greatness and nobility, the magnanimity of a king to offer help unquestionably to a suppliant. Or is it? Śivadāsa appears to be concerned about this article of faith in the code of honour of kings and heroes, and probes deeply into the assumptions of the code. He is questioning the code placing ‘the image’ of an ideal ruler with the realities that governance is involved in.

  Further, there is another interesting aspect to the question-answer exercise. The vetāla’s behaviour is extraordinary and puzzling. No sooner does the king give the answer or offer the solution required, than the vetāla leaves his shoulders and flies back to the Śinśipā tree to hang once again from a branch on it. The king and we are back to square one, at the base of the dreadful tree with the hanging corpse. The whole procedure, arduous and tormenting as it must have been for the king to get hold of his elusive and slippery customer, hauling the corpse over his shoulders and setting out towards the horrible cremation grounds where Kṣāntiśīla was sitting in eager expectation, has to start all over again. And so it goes on and on until twenty-four (or twenty-five) tales have been told.

  Considering that whatever answer the king makes, the vetāla flies away to his tree, it is tempting to dismiss the whole exercise as pointless and futile, except to see it as a narrative device, a convenient peg to hang tales from, for pure entertainment, a legitimate enough purpose no doubt. But pure entertainment is not always the sole aim of tales, especially of the Śivadāsa version of the Vetāla Tales. There is definitely an ethical and metaphysical dimension in Śivadāsa’s shaping and articulation of the material of the Vetāla stories centering round the famous monarch, Vikramāditya, that is an integral part of the structure of his text, and this will become clear in the following paragraphs.

  Before considering the question-answer format and suggesting a way of looking at it to see what, if any, purpose it serves, certain points have to be made about the king’s mission itself, its nature and the time and place marked out for its performance and the manner in which it has to be carried out.

  The day and time that Kṣāntiśīla selects for the terrible mission he thrusts upon Vikramāditya is highly significant.

  The day is the fourteenth day of the dark half of the month of Bhadrā that marks the beginning of the dark half of the year, when the sun starts its downward course towards the south. The south is the region of darkness and death; the north of life and light. And the time is midnight on this day of the new moon. It is a special day and night, given over to the reign of demonic forces, especially in and around the place of the dead, the cremation grounds.

  The frame story leads the king and the reader out of the splendid Court in the capital, Pratiṣṭhāna, into the murky world of evil and bloody savagery of the terrible cremation grounds outside the great city. There has already been a gruesome murder in the forests edging the cremation grounds, years before the encounter of Vikramāditya and the yogi, Kṣāntiśīla. In a powerful and dramatic passage of eleven verses built of long compound words articulating vivid, evocative imagery (pp.17–19), Śivadāsa paints a landscape of spine-chilling horrors which leads us to the base of the Śinśipā tree from whose branches hangs the wasted corpse of the unfortunate son of the oil-merchant murdered by Kṣāntiśīla. This event took place many years before Kṣāntiśīla, having mastered all the arts of black magic and performed severe austerities, comes to the court of King Vikramāditya with murder in his heart.

  In this crucial passage of description, one of two, placed for a purpose at these particular points in the text, Śivadāsa paints i
n bold strokes a scene where demonic forces are rampant, engaged in wild, orgiastic rites and practices. It is a scene reminiscent of the savagery of bloody battles of the epic past. Śivadāsa’s writing is highly allusive in this passage, resonant with echoes from the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, evocative of passages describing the carnage of the Bhārata War, the fierce sacking and burning of the great city of Lankā, the deceptions and illusions that occur in the forests where the exiled Rāma loses Sītā. The passage reaches its high point when Śivadāsa moves from the distant past into the even more distant future, to the end of time and the destruction of the universe. Time (Kāla), in the form of the primal sound of OM annihilates the universe and by implication, therefore, since Time brought the universe into being, we are both at the Beginning when nothing was and at the End when nothing will be. Thus within the narrow compass of a few stanzas, so powerfully articulated, the whole history of the world and of mankind is drawn in. This is the place set as the place for Vikramāditya’s mission. This passage, it must be emphasized, is not placed here as pure description for its own sake, but forms an integral part of the structure of the narrative. This place, the cremation grounds is the natural habitat of both the Vetāla and the yogi, Kṣāntiśīla. So greatly evocative a passage as this is necessary to convey the gravity of the danger that Kṣāntiśīla poses not only to the hero, but to the whole world that he is destined to rule.

  As already noted, Śivadāsa uses the intrinsic qualities of the champu form, skilfully: the prose to tell the story, and the verse, capable of both pithiness (in the gnomic verses) and elaborate, allusive richness to create other effects. The former serves to provide the indirect comments of the author; the latter creates the ambience of terror as in the passage referred to here; and of earthly magnificence and divine aura as in the earlier passage descriptive of the hero and his virtues, and of the ideal of kingship (p.13).

  The landscape that Śivadāsa paints in this passage is fully in keeping in tone with the sinister happenings in the preamble, and it further underlines the daring and courage and steadfastness of purpose of the hero, as well as the dangerous and life threatening character of the mission that he has accepted willingly. This passage leads straight through the cremation grounds to the Śinśipā tree standing at its edge—the periphery of Kṣāntiśīla’s demonic world—like some sort of marker between two worlds, the demonic world of the necromancer and the storybook world of the genie. On one of its branches hangs the corpse, blue-black, cadaverous, spectral, ‘a horrid sight’ (p.19).

  The tree is an important element in the bitter story of deceit and betrayal resulting in the shedding of innocent blood, told in the preamble. The woods where it stands have been already mentioned twice in the preamble. It is these woods where the bark-eating ascetic, Valkalāśana sat in silent solitude for a thousand years, meditating, in the hope of gaining everlasting life, until he lost all, giving rein to unbridled sexual passion. And it is in the same woods, where one of his triple offspring killed one sibling, was now planning to kill the other.

  ‘Some four miles from here, O king… a corpse hangs from the branches of a śinśipā tree…’ says Kṣāntiśīla to Vikramāditya. Here, interestingly, Śivadāsa carefully notes the distance from the centre of the cremation grounds where Kṣāntiśīla situates himself to the periphery where the tree of execution stands, and thereby suggests the time it would take the hero to traverse that distance. Yojanārdhe, that is, half-a-yojana is the term in the text. A yojana is roughly nine miles.

  Physically, the distance marks the space existing between the centre of the great cremation grounds, its heart of darkness where the evil yogi sits waiting impatiently to perform the Rite of the Corpse, and the other point on the periphery where the tree of death and judgement, the śinśipā tree, stands as a marker. Part of this distance would be traversed in the time-taken to tell each tale.

  In a metaphysical sense, this distance measures the space between the murderer, the yogi, Kṣāntiśīla and his innocent victim, now a spectral shape animated by the genie through whom he, the oil-merchant’s murdered son, will ultimately redress the wrong done to him.

  The genie only appears in the beginning to be wily and capricious, raising obstacles to prevent the hero from accomplishing the mission entrusted to him by Kṣāntiśīla. In the end, it is clear that the genie is in fact the saviour of the hero, and of the world.

  In the text, Kṣāntiśīla is referred to as the yogi and ‘the naked mendicant’. The terms yoga and yogi (one who practises yoga) have a meaning other than what is normally understand. Yoga, a word signifying the mental and physical discipline undertaken to integrate the self, ātmā. Ultimately, with the supreme self, Brahma (yoga is from the root yuk, to yoke, to unite), also signifies the study and practice of esoteric knowledge, chiefly of the arts of magic and sorcery. It is in the sense of a sorcerer that the term yogi is applied to Kṣāntiśīla. The other term ‘digambara’ (the naked mendicant) is pejorative.

  Kṣāntiśīla is a man who is consumed by lust for total power and dominion. He is aiming at achieving his objectives by performing the rites that would gain him the eight Siddhis.

  To be minute as an atom or enormous as a mountain,

  light as air or heavy as rock; to be invisible at will

  to have all one’s desires fulfilled, to subject others to one’s will:

  and to have lordship of the world.

  (pp.15–16)

  These rites appear to have included a human sacrifice. The accession of such powers would free the possessor from all the bounds of humanness and mortality, make him semi-divine and more, for he would be as a god. It is this unbounded ambition and the terrifying prospect that Kṣāntiśīla might reach his goal that would make him dangerous, a threat to the world that has to be destroyed without delay.

  The brooding presence of evil represented by/or embodied in the evil yogi remains a palpable presence throughout the narrative, though Kṣāntiśīla’s physical presence is there only in the prologue and the epilogue. The corpse of his victim and the tree to which he bound it are constant reminders of him.

  The genie that lives within the corpse and makes the murdered man live again is also bound to the śinśipā tree. As suggested already the genie is probably intended by śivadāsa to be the ātmā of the murdered oil merchant’s son. For, as stated earlier, it is common belief that the spirits of those dying violent and unnatural deaths restlessly haunt the spot where the deaths occurred.

  The repeated return to the śinśipā tree is an integral part of the narrative structure. It is inevitable because Vikramāditya (and we, the readers, with him) is inexorably linked to the tree and the genie-in-the-corpse from the moment he makes a firm commitment to Kṣāntiśīla to aid him in the performance of the Rite of the Corpse. The repeated act of walking to and from the śinśipā tree has to go on until the train of events set in motion by the initial act of wrongdoing, the ill-considered action of King Gandharvasena, father of the hero, is broken; until the pattern of crime-retribution is dissolved at the end by the ritual, slaying, at which point evil is contained, in the world of the text. It is the world of the text that is under consideration, although it is related to our own everyday world in many undefined ways and though the problems and concerns of the world in which the text lives and moves are relevant to those in the world we the readers live and move in.

  The ritual slaying of the slayer releases the genie from the corpse and its tree home. However, the second boon asked for by Vikramāditya, that the genie be his minister and carry out his orders, is hard to explain. And we should perhaps not try to look for an explanation. A work of art has its own logic. We can try to see how it works in its own world, and not ask why.

  Right through the narrative, the three ‘brothers’ strangely linked to one another at birth and to the child born of a fallen ascetic and a fallen woman, continue to be linked. The text does not, however, specifically identify the vetāla (the genie in the corpse)
and Kṣāntiśīla, the necromancer, as the two other members of this ‘brotherhood’, the sons born to the potter and the oil merchant and related in some inscrutable manner to the dismembered child of the ascetic and the courtesan. This is a secret hidden in the dark heart of the narrative and known only to the two, the yogi and the genie, until the very end. Even then the identity is not stated bluntly, but suggested. Śivadāsa’s art works through suggestion.

  As the frame story draws to a close and the storytelling session begins, we leave behind the Kṣāntiśīlan world of murder and mayhem presented in the frame story and enter the delightful storybook world that the vetāla, a witty and capricious but superb teller of tales, creates for the reader and the king. It is a world that mirrors Vikramāditya’s world. As already noted, we are periodically returned to the savage world of the śinśipā tree and Kṣāntiśīla, the evil yogi. There is a pause between tales, before the genie takes the king and us once again into its storybook world. In this pause, the narrative situates the question-answer exchange between Vikramāditya and the vetāla.

  Many of the tales appear to be constructed with a view to let certain situations emerge at the end giving rise to problems that demand solutions. These problems are not dissimilar to those that Vikramāditya would face in the day-to-day dispensation of justice. It is as if the genie is presenting a case time and time again before the king and asking for a judgement. The answers that the king gives to the genie’s questions are not unlike the judgements that he would deliver in his hall of audience. One purpose therefore of the question-answer exchange is to test the hero’s wisdom and knowledge of the Law (Dharma) in all its aspects; ‘ever dedicated to upholding the Law/in its manifold aspects’ is how Śivadāsa characterizes the hero (p.13 frame story). But there is a deeper purpose. The hero is tested in a more thorough manner to prove himself as something more than a judge of the supreme court. He has to be in reality the ideal monarch as described in the opening of the frame story(p.13 frame story). The education in governance that he has received as a prince is not adequate, not rounded enough for this purpose. It has left him vulnerable in certain respects, for instance to the crafty manipulations and designs, upon his innate nobility of nature, of Kṣāntiśīla. The education has to be completed now in the hard school of experience.