Two examples of traditional riddle tales from India can be found on the riddles page. Here is some background information about them.No one knows how old most folktales are, since the tradition is usually carried on by the common people, or by nursemaids, grannies and other support figures around the household. In most cultures this group would not have had a high percentage of literate individuals.
The first written selection of folktales from India was the sixth-century Pancatantra, which was one of the first Indian books to be translated into Western languages. Versions of traditional tales were floating around long before that, though. We don't even know where most of them originated because they have been disseminated through a lot of different cultures. Many centuries-old Indian stories, for instance, appear in slightly different versions in the classical canon of the Greeks and Romans, under the name of Aesop.
Perhaps the most famous literary collection of Indian folktales is the Sanskrit Kathasaritsagara, or "Ocean of the Sea of Story," an elaborately nested series of interlinked tales compiled by a Brahmana named Somadeva sometime around the year 1070.
The Three Suitors of Mandaravati"The Three Suitors of Mandaravati" is the second tale from the Vetalapancavinsati, or "The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie," by Shivadasa, who lived and wrote in India sometime between the 11th and 14th centuries. The tales themselves are much older, being derived from an ancient oral tradition.
The 25 "tales" are actually 24 riddles in narrative form and a frame tale. It's a complicated story but to strip it down to its basic concept, a supernatural being called a vetala tests the wisdom of a king by posing him a series of riddles. Finally, with riddle #24, the vetala poses a riddle the king cannot answer. Tale #25 is the story of what happens after the king gets stumped.
According to the king, Mandaravati should be married to the second suitor, the one who built a hut beside her funeral pyre. His reasoning was that the suitor who burned to death and was reborn alongside her should be looked upon as her brother, while the suitor who recited the mantra that gave her life should be looked upon as a father. But by remaining at her side throughout it all the second suitor had proven his worthiness in the role of husband. Do you agree with the king's decision?
An excellent edition of the Vetalapancavinsati, translated from the Sanskrit by Chandra Rajan, was published by Penguin India in 1995.
A Test of GenerosityThis tale appears in a number of forms in several editions of Indian narrative, with slightly different details according to the teller's preference. Fans of the medieval English author Geoffrey Chaucer may recognize some details that found their way into his "Franklin's Tale," which appears in The Canterbury Tales. Such an appearance in a work composed in such a distant country is impressive proof of how widely these humble oral tales found their way across the world. Other European writers, such as the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron, have also passed along stories that are clearly related to stories from the Indian canon.
In adapting the Indian version I have most closely followed an account that appears in A.K. Ramanujan's Folktales of India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages (Pantheon Books, 1991). Ramanujan is probably the best 20th-century expert on India's oral tradition in both its high (e.g., epic) and low (e.g., folktale) forms. In his notes on this story, which appears as a side tale embedded in a longer narrative, he cites as his source Paltadi Ramakrishna Achar's Tuluvara Janapada Kategalu, a collection of traditional literature written originally in Tulu, a Dravidian language that today is the mother tongue of some 2.5 million people in southwest India.
--Susan Spencer, Ph.D., University of Central Oklahoma Department of English
