by Sivadasa
Śivadāsa prepares the ground carefully and in a subtle manner in the prologue (preamble-frame story) for the purpose of investing the question-answer format with significance. The question-answer exercise, the genie’s repeated disappearing act and the walking back and forth through the terrible cremation grounds, yield excellent artistic insights if viewed as a test-cum-ordeal that the hero is repeatedly subjected to.
In many folk and fairy tales the hero has to pass a difficult test and is often required to go through an ordeal, at times life threatening, successfully, before he can claim and be awarded the great prize that he is destined to possess. A tough riddle to be solved, a.difficult question to be answered, an intricate knot to be unknotted or a web to be unravelled; a monster to be killed hiding in a labyrinth, a blazing fire or treacherous rapids to be entered a target to be hit under impossible circumstances and so on—these are some of the examples of tests and ordeals that we are familiar with in literature.
Vikramāditya has to undergo a test and ordeal, repeatedly; twenty-four times to be precise. Repetition of a word, a chant or prayer, or an act, is itself a discipline. The hero of the Vetāla Tales has to perform the ordeal of walking through the landscape of horrors, the cremation grounds, outside his great capital repeatedly. He does so with unwavering determination and he walks not alone, but with a corpse that he carries on his shoulders and driven by a seemingly implacable demon dwelling within the corpse. The mission that he has undertaken is harsh, extremely arduous, and worse, immeasurably humiliating, even life threatening, enough to drive the strongest in mind and heart crazy. The prize is inestimable, no less than the present sovereignty of the whole, wide earth and the future inheritance of the fabled kingdom of the Vidyādharas. But Vikramāditya is totally unaware of all this. He does not have a clue either that he is being tested and that he is actually involved in an ordeal to prove something—his fitness. Vikramāditya has willingly undertaken this mission, at first totally ignorant of the perils involved, only to keep his promise to the man who had brought him untold riches in the form of priceless gems, and out of the innate nobility and magnanimity in him that never said no to a suppliant. What he promises to do and persists in doing is prompted by duty and not by desire. This is a distinctive feature of the test-ordeal motif in the Vetāla Tales which distinguishes it not only from such motifs in other literatures but more importantly from tests and ordeals and challenges accepted by heroes in Indian literature itself. Rāma, Arjuna, Aja and other epic heroes know what is involved and precisely what the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is. Not so our hero, Vikramāditya, and this is a very significant difference between this and many other texts that depict the great deeds of a hero.
The site of the test and the nature of the ordeal are also singularly different and distinctive. The site is not a gilded court, a splendid tournament. It is literally the wilderness, desolate, an unimaginable place of horrors—the cremation grounds. The hero is tested and judged by a committee of one, the genie, who is deputizing, as we learn at the end, for the whole host of the Immortals and the Trinity (p. 181). Once he has demonstrated his pre-eminent fitness to occupy the most coveted post, a post for which Kṣāntiśīla has killed once and is willing to kill again, his election is by general, full-throated acclamation with the supreme lord Śiva bestowing the final benediction in person. Honour and rewards come unsolicited to Vikramāditya. He does his duty as he is expected to without any expectations.
The test is framed to assess qualities in the hero over and above, though including qualities normally expected and found in great kings: valour and daring, magnificence, liberality, wisdom and so on. A whole gamut of other highly desirable qualities are expected in Vikramāditya, the future Ćakravarti (one who turns the wheel of empire) and lord of the Vidyādharas, and found to be present in him and displayed under great pressure: poise and purposefulness, calmness and patience in the face of intense frustration, perseverance despite the tricks of his slippery customer, the genie, who tries his best to foil the hero’s best attempts to fulfil Kṣāntiśīla’s need for the corpse. The genie has the most commendable reasons for what he does but the hero has not a clue to it. Most important is the absence of sheer rage or even passing impatience in Vikramāditya over the repeated failure of his mission as he understands it given his ignorance of the truth of the matter; and the unwavering determination he displays to carry a mission undertaken to its bitter end at whatever cost. Without a murmur, the king simply walks back to the śinśipā tree and goes through what he has done before. ‘The king went back once again to the same place…’ A simple statement of fact expressed more or less in the same words in tale after tale, to indicate the repetition of the same act. No emotion is conveyed; the king does what he has to do, quietly, with no fuss.
Such qualities as these are found sadly lacking in the other king, Gandharvasena, the father of Vikramāditya. Enraged by a trivial incident, the intransigent silence of an anchorite which he misinterprets as an affront to his royal dignity, not understanding the silence to be an essential part of the anchorite’s vows, King Gandharvasena sets in motion a train of events that sows the seed of evil and brings death into his world, and by extension, danger to the whole world. His son redeems this parental wrongdoing.
Vikramāditya is first presented by Śivadāsa as the embodiment of ideal kingship (frame story p.13). Is he truly what he is cried up to be? Or is what is said of him simply what bards always said of the monarchs they served? That has to be tested and established beyond all reasonable doubt, for the fate of the world and its peoples hangs on it. Vikramāditya is tried and tested and found true, nothing wanting.
When Vikramāditya passes the test successfully, and only then, does the genie impart to him the truth about the yogi Kṣāntiśīla and his nefarious plans and instructs him in the means to thwart Kṣāntiśīla’s evil designs.
The nature of the task laid (literally) on Vikramāditya’s shoulders is the meanest, most despicable imaginable for one so great. Highest of the high in the land, ‘the jewel among kings’, Vikramāditya is asked to perform the lowest of the low menial acts—carrying a corpse on his shoulders that even the hangman would do only out of necessity and with abhorrence. Yet, Vikramāditya does this unquestioningly, without a murmur.
The task is specifically designed to humble and chasten the magnificent monarch. It places him in a situation that he has never been in before. It opens his eyes to realities that he has never known before. It is one thing to face enemies of flesh and blood in person in battlefields with their ambience of glory and wild excitement, with trumpets blaring and drums resounding to the skies, great warriors on prancing horses and gilded chariots, swords glittering and pennants flying, following their magnificent monarch and bards singing his praises. It is quite another matter to walk alone in the darkness of the cremation grounds, the hell on earth if there were a hell and feel the presence of faceless assailants and walk surrounded by nameless persons, real and imagined; all this and more when there was nothing in it for him. This is true heroism. It is like the sun striding forth in obedience to the Cosmic Law, Ṛtā, of the Vedas; and it justifies the hero’s name, Vikramāditya, a name that means both the Sun of Valour, and the sun striding forth.
Each of the extant recensions of the Vetāla Tales concludes each and every tale with a question-answer passage followed by the disappearance of the genie and the other details already discussed. But it is only in Śivadāsa’s text that these details of narrative are invested with significance and made integral parts of the narrative structure and employed to convey a vision. It is Śivadāsa’s effective use and precise placement where it would have the greatest impact on the text, of the story in the preamble; the two main passages of description in the text: one, the characterization of the king, Vikramāditya, an individual ruler and the ideal of kingship, and two, the powerful description of the cremation grounds packed with epic imagery and mythic resonances that creates a scene of palpable horror; and g
enerally the skilful deployment of language strategies in the text as a whole, that makes his work a minor classic.
VI
Śivadāsa’s work, the Vetālapañćavinśati is a neglected work, undeservedly so.
We know nothing about Śivadāsa, perhaps not even his name. For the name under which the work goes may well be a nom de plume, as in the case of Kalīdāsa. What we know is what we can glean from a careful reading of his text.
Śivadāsa is a man of great learning, even erudition. Bits of information from various fields of contemporary knowledge—astrology (preamble, tale 2), medicine (tale 2)—quaint bits of knowledge from treatises on drama (the theory of the nāyikās, or heroines and of the ten stages of being in love, of Bharata Muni in tale 3, subtale-ii; tale 16) from treatises in the amatory arts and on feminine beauty (tale 3, subtale ii, tale 4); central tenets from Buddhist, Jain, Śaiva thought are brought in and fitted neatly into the narrative.
From such passages we might conclude that Śivadāsa wrote primarily for a certain type of reader: the gallants, nāgarikas, well-educated, cultivated, accomplished men-about-town with a keen interest in the fine arts and beautiful women, with a lot of time on their hands and plenty of money in their purses, men who were aesthetes, dilettantes, wrote poetry, painted the pictures of their mistresses, played music, danced, told stories, understood the finer points of writing. Such a readership (or audience, if Śivadāsa did narrate his tales, as he well might have done) would be familiar with tales told over and over again and would expect something a little different in the telling and the writing of the old favourites. Such a readership would look for something to titillate their jaded palates and judge the skill of the author in introducing non-fictional material into the narrative without awkwardness and with artistry. An example would be the delightful paean to the joys of chewing paan and supari and the glories of musk (p.26-27):
Oh! For a chewy roll of paan leaf
filled with scented supari
laced with slaked lime and spices!
and
Musk! Its birthplace is not a place of note,
its hue is nothing to write home about;
at a distance appearing to advantage,
smeared on the body it is mistaken for mud.
One can imagine the responses to this in an ‘arty’ salon of handsome, young connoisseurs of literature; the approving nods of the head and amused smiles, the coy looks and giggles of the ‘ladies’ in the company (not wives).
Śivadāsa is not without wit and humour. The lines quoted above and the whole passage has the ring of a take-off of some contemporary poet or other. In Tale 2, there is unmistakeable irony in the verses describing the grave itemization of symptoms, prognosis and findings of a conclave of physicians summoned by the Brāhmana, Keśava, to cure his daughter, Mandāravatī of snake bite. While the girl is dying, unattended, and the father is desperate to save her, the physicians solemnly exhibit their medical knowledge. There are many such passages in Śivadāsa’s narrative of the Vetāla Tales where he is gently critical, witty and takes a shot at pomposity, pretentiousness, sanctimonious hypocrisy (Tale 17).
Śivadāsa’s text has an ethical dimension as well. Like the Panćatantra it is in part a nitiśāstra; it lays out the main requisites to live wisely and well. But it has less accomplishment and artistry compared to its great predecessor.
A simple and straightforward narrative
pleases some learned readers;
some, wiser, delight in the figurative—
irony, ambiguity, metaphors,
while others love a tale filled with flavours
of fine sentiments plentiful and pleasing.
So there’s something here to suit every palate.
It is not an unjustified claim by the author of the Vetāla Tales.
Postscript
This introduction would not be really complete without the mention of the latest recension of our own times, of the Vetāla Tales—Vikram and the Vampire—composed by Richard Burton during the ‘Indian’ phase of his long and quite extraordinary career. Predictably, it is more Burtonian than Indian. Burton felt that the bare bones of the Indian narrative needed to be fleshed out. And that is just what he did. It is his version of a very ancient cycle of stories about Vikramāditya and a genie (not a vampire) who teased the king, taught him through telling tales, saved him and ultimately became his minister (in our version by Śivadāsa); perhaps a sort of factotum in other versions, begetting a whole host of sons in other storytelling traditions to serve other royal and not so royal masters as slaves and servants; djinns who lived in bottles, in dusty lamps and wherever else they could make a home. Then there was a change of sex. And in the fairy tale world of Hollywood, our wise and witty genie, became Jeanie who appeared and disappeared with a nod of her head and a toss of her ponytail. She had a bottle too in which she lived; she married an astronaut and tried hard not to tread on the sensitive corns of a rather quaint and conservative, suburban community that lived at the ‘base’ where her astronaut-husband worked as a guinea pig for experiments on space travel. A far cry indeed from the banks of the mighty Godāvarī. But tales do travel far and suffer a ‘sea change’ when they cross the perilous oceans of the world!
About the Title
Who Is the Vetāla?
The Vetālapañćavinsattkā of āivadāsa is named after not the hero but the narrator of the tales, the vetāla, a being that inhabits an ancient corpse hanging from a tree at the edge of the cremation grounds.
Who or what is the vetāla? The word vetāla is of doubtful etymology, notes Monier Williams in his dictionary of the Sanskrit language. That might be because the word is non-Sanskritic in origin. There are many such words in Sanskrit that have come into the language from the other languages and dialects in India; and vice versa.
The word vetāla signifies a being, a power, or divinity that is non-Vedic, non-Brahmanic (I am using the term not for a class, but for a system of beliefs, practices and worship), even pre-Vedic in all probability.
There is a class of divine or semi-divine beings that form part of the vast collection of deities and divinities, major and minor, in Indian mythology: yakṣa, yakṣa, vidyṣdhara, vidyādharī and others. These were divinities that reigned supreme in the earliest times, honoured and worshipped by the first ‘nations’ of the land, adored as well as placated. They were symbols of the forces of nature, centres of power and plenitude in the natural world, perceived as givers of riches and prosperity, of fertility to man and beast and the land; naturally beneficent powers that could and did turn hostile and malevolent to man when he transgressed nature’s holy laws, rampaging and destroying his environment. These divinities, or powers in the universe, were seen by their worshippers as indwelling spirits of woods and waters; of hills, streams, pools and trees. The existence to this day of tree worship, snake worship and the worship of streams and rivers (waters) points to the existence of these and other forms of non-Vedic, non-Brahmanic religions in the ancient times. The vetāla was one of these divinities. In one of the recensions (southern) of the Tales of the Thirty-two-Statuettes, referred to in the introduction, King Vikramāditya, faced by terrible portents in Ujjayini which foretold his imminent defeat and death, addresses the Vetāla who is always at his beck and call, as Yaksa: ‘Listen, O Yaksa! Go fly over this whole earth and find out who has been born to kill me.…’ The yakṣas, as already noted, are ancient divinities, honoured and worshipped.
Since the Vikramāditya story cycles including the Vetāla Tales are located in the region of the Vindhyas and the areas adjacent to it, it seems most likely that the vetāla was a divinity worshipped by the people of this area; the word probably belongs then to some language spoken by these people.
Like the yakṣa-yaksṣ, the vetāla is closely associated with trees, suggesting that it was a divinity related to and controlling vegetation and fertility to whom blood sacrifices, including human sacrifices, were offered. This is a common feature of ancien
t fertility cults.
The vetāla, and a class of chthonic deities, generally known as bhūtas, were closely associated with Śiva and functioned as his attendants. Śiva and the mother goddess, Devī, known and worshipped under many names, Vindhyavāsinī, being one of them, are associated both with Kailāsa and the Himalayas, and the Vindhyas. Śiva is also associated with cremation grounds, corpses, skulls and all the other furniture of the cremation grounds and the symbols of death and dissolution. Śiva is the power of dissolution as well as the creation and maintenance of the universe. This two-in-one godhead unites opposing aspects in himself; creating-destroying, calm-fierce, benevolent-wild. The vetāla, as śiva’s attendant spirit, is naturally linked to the cremation grounds and corpses; and shares his master’s ambivalence—helpful, beneficent, if man lives in harmony with the natural world, hostile and malevolent if, as already pointed out, nature’s holy laws are broken (as Kṣāntiśīla does in the text).