SYNTACTIC PROCESS

Sequence one:

I. A king has no male child. He orders his pregnant wife, who

already has delivered nine girls, to kill the child or herself if she
delivers a girl child again.

This tale, which has been taken as the nucleus tale, glves-
~xpression to the frustration of a father pining for a son. The sight of
his nine girls even makes him angry and he does not wish to have any
more female offspring.

The childless king motif is a starting point for many folktales.

The functional value of the motif may be trivial in the larger context
of the tale, but it serves as a point of departure to a folktale and takes
the hearers to a mythical world. It acts as a transition between the real
world and the magical world of the folktales.

A well-known folktale is the story of king Matanakaman. It

starts with the narration that for a long time both the king and his
minister were childless. In order to propitiate the gqds, they renovated
and endowed the temples of Siva, Vishnu, and Brahma. They
performed sacrifices, supported pilgrims, and offered gifts of food,
gold, and all the thirty-two kinds of donation.

The snake king story starts with the tenth marriage of the
King, who has not been able to have a child as yet. Soon after the
marriage, the king informs the tenth wife that if she fails to conceive
within a year, she will join her predecessors servant-maid in the

41
palace. The new queen, who has seen the desperate situation of her
predecessors, is in tears:

The story of the tortoise prince begins thus: Long ago, king
Venkatarajan ruled over Mallikarjunapuram. Even a long time after
marriage his queen did not bear ~im any child. First he was sad, then
he began to dislike his wife, and finally to hate her. He married
another princess, sending his first wife to another palace, and putting
her under the guard of a court· dancer. The king loved his new wife
dearly, but when, even after many months his new queen did not
conceive, the king realized that the blessing of children was for him
neither a gift of God nor a gift elf mortals.

In all these tales, the pining implicitly is for a male child. The
childless kings perform many deeds of charity, pray to gods, and
finally are rewarded with a boy child. Both king Matanakaman and
the minister are blessed with a male child. In the snake king story the
tenth wife bears two sons. The second queen in the tortoise prince
story also bears a son.

The preference for a male child is explicitly expressed in the

story of Chinnathambi. In this story Ramappakatai and his wife Pulal
had no children. Listening to the.ir pleas for a child God blessed them,
but the child was a girL Plulal cOmplains:

"0 my Lord! 0 my Father!

Are all my sufferings, pain, and penance

for this, a female child,

One that would leave me?

One for myself, won't I have?"

42
 " Childlessness may be perceived by the protagonists of the
folktales as aphysiologicaJ deficiency of the wife, a misfortune, or a
disfavour by an angry God. The husband marries again, sometimes
even ten times (the snake king). In the story of the squirrel prince,

.
the childless king marries four girls in four consecutive years and
when they show no sign ()f conception sends them off as servant-
maids and marries a fifth time ..

No one would dare to impute to the king that he may be

sterile. When, even after many marriages up issue is forthcoming, the
cause is ascribed to God's displeasure. But there is one folktale,
which is an exception to this lack of understanding. The story goes
like this:

A childless husband sent his wife to live with a woodcutter

living in the forest. The wife stayed with the woodcutter for more
than a month and conceived. She then returned to her house and bore
a boy. But when the boy became of marriageable age, the woodcutter
came to the village and wanted to take him away, claiming to be his
father.

The case went before the viilage headman. He asked the

woodcutter to give his argument. The woodcutter said, Sir, this man
gave me an empty bag long back. I kept some coins in it. When he
came again, he took away both the bag and the coins. So please ask
him to return my coins.

The husband replied, Sir, I had a cow in my house. I sent her

to his house for breeding. Now, he is asking for the calf just because
the cow conceived in his house. Now tell me to whom the calf
belongs, to the cow's owner or the bullock's owner?

4J
 The wife said, Sir, I had kept a cup of milk to curdle it as
curd. But I didn't have the lemon to ferment it. So I borrowed it from
my neighbour. Now he has come and is asking me to return the curd.
Tell me, to whom does the curd belong?

The headman Had no answer for this problem. So he asked the

boy with whom he wanted to go. The boy answered, Let me marry
first. I want to go with my wife.

When even repeated marriages failed to produce an issue, the

cause of this barrenness was presumed to be the disfavour of the
supernatural beings. So the kings began to do acts of charity and
piety; they even want to the extent of becoming ascetics.

In the story of the fish prince, the childless king approached a

sage for help. The sage gave him a mango to be given to his wives.
The king gave the fruit to the younger queen who divided the fruit
unfairly, keeping the pulp to herself and gave only the stone to the
elder queen. They both ate their share and conceived simultaneously.

The childless king in the story of the tortoise prince resorted

to punishing austerities. Once when he was praying with. his mind
directed solely to the goal of obtaining sons, the king suddenly saw
the Lord appearing before him, giving him a fresh mango fruit.

In the story of the snake king, the tenth queen, threatened by

the King, that she too would meet the fate of her predecessors if she
proves childless, is crying alone in the garden in fear and sorrow. An

.
old woman accosts her and asks the reason for her tears. On knowing
the reason she consoles her and gives her two magical flowers. One
red and the other white and--the red for a son and the white for a
daughter. The queen eats both the flowers, eager to get both a son and
a daughter and conceives immediately.

In another Tale, the childless wife seeks the blessings of a

sage for a child. The sage tells her that she is childless because the
snake god is angry with her. To pacify him, the sage advises her to do
austerities and prescribes a special fruit from amagical tree in the
local temple. She performs the austerities, but when she plucks the
magical fruit, a snake guarding the tree comes to bite her. She begs
the snake to spare her for the moment and promises to surrender
herself to him after she has borne nine children. The snake spares her
life. The woman eats the fruit and conceives.

Another folktale tells how a dog in the palace conceives after

eating the skin of a magical fruit. The childless king offers to his wife
a fruit given by a sage. She thoughtlessly throws the skin and the
stone of the fruit in the dustbin. The dog eating it also conceives at
the same time that the queen does.

Even today, people in Tamil Nadu believe that barrenness is

closely linked with divine displeasure. Almost every childless couple,
rural or urban, illiterate or literate, visits holy places, performs
austerities and sacrifices, and approaches self-avowed sages. There is
a belief in popular Tamil culture that a woman would conceive if she.
regularly goes around a banyan tree thrice at a time.

The birth of a child is auspicious. It symbolizes good fortune,

the continuity of a clan, a gift of the gods, the entry of a child in the
kinship structure and the transformation of a couple into a father and
a mother. On the other hand, childlessness is shameful. In the story of
Chinnathambi, the childless Pulal bemoans:

45
 "No beggars at the gate-cursed is the woman sterile!

No boy in the house, turn not their eyes ever!

Have we beaten anybody, have we done things unjust? ..

Have we delayed alms to the beggars?

Have we added empty corns in a barn of paddy?

Have we lent money on interest unfair?"

Childlessness is explained as punishment for the past error,

mistake or sin of a particular person or family. It is not because of
any physiological problem but because of social misbehaviour. To be
blessed with children a couple must live in perfect social harmony.

Childless wives in Tamil Nadu also follow a religious practice

called mun choru (rice on soil). At the end of a month marked by
abstention from non-vegetarian, oily, salty, sour foods, sex,
entertainment, etc. they spread cooked rice on the floor at the
entrance of the temple and eat it while kneeling.

Th·ere is only bne story in the present author's knowledge

where a girl child is explicitly abhorred, the king telling the queen to
do away with the child or kill herself. Infanticide is the theme of
another story as well:

A couple in a village had four children, two girls and two

boys. The father eked out a living by selling firewood. Feeling
himself unable to support his family the frustrated father ordered his
wife to kill the children. The poor mother hid the children in a secret
place and told the father that she had obeyed his order. But from the
next day' things became even worse as the whole country was ravaged
by a famine. The miserable father now began to feel guilty and
thought that"his sin had brought this misfortune to them. He confessed
his feelings to his wife one day, who then told him the truth about
their children and called them back. They all lived happily from that
day onwards.

Infanticide, especially of the female infant, is practised in

some parts of Tamil Nadu even today. Female infanticide is known to
occur in three villages particularly, two in western Tamil Nadu and
one in central Tamil Nadu. All these villages are inhabited by the
Kallar caste, which was branded as a criminal tribes during the
colonial period.

The practice is not discussed openly. The infant is killed in the

first ten days of birth, with straw stuffed in her mouth. Mostly the
local midwife is asked to do this by the elders of the family. In some
cases the grandmother, the father, or even the mother may do this.

The dowry system is cited as the major reason in support of

this custom. Almost all over Tamil Nadu, in the utilitarian point of
view, the male child is the source of income where as the female is
the symbol of expenditure. The female' child never belongs to the
parents Or the family of her birth. She i.s one who has to be given out.

II. Birth of an undesirable child or monster:

In the nucleus tale, her husband's demand that she should

deliver~ a boy child makes the queen helpless. The king gives his
ultimatum just when the time for her delivery is due and goes out.

47
 o In most folktales, childbirth takes place smoothly and
painlessly. In some tales the delivery takes place without any
assistance or guidance.

In the story of the snake king, the queen ha& an usually

swollen belly. She is hopeful of delivering twins, a boy and a girl, as
she had taken both the white and red flowers. But the matter is still a
secret. As the time for her delivery approaches, she confines herself
i

to her room. The king has had abell installed in her room which she
is expected to ring as soon as she in delivered of the offspring.

The queen delivers a snake, hide behind the idol of the local
mother goddess, Kaliammal, in the temple. The shocked queen is
about to faint. She regrets her greediness in eating both the magical
flowers given by the old lady. But to her utter relief, she next delivers
a beautiful boy and rings the bell to announce the good news. The
snake birth is a secret known only to her.

In the tale where the queen eats the pulp of the magical fruit
given to relieve her barrenness, but thoughtlessly discards the skin
and stone which a female dog feeds on, the queen is delivered of two
pups but the dog is delivered of two human infants.

In Tamil culture the girl who is expecting for the first time is
brought to her mother's house in the seventh month of the pregnancy,
ador!led with new dresses and colourful bangles. It is a festive
occasion, with the relatives of the girl. The girl stays in her mother's
house until after delivery, when her husband comes to take her.

In one folktale, a scheming stepmother used this occa'iion to

harm her stepdaughter, who had been married to the local prince. The
jealous stepmother, when she heard of the girl's pregnancy, went the

4X
prince's house to take her home for the deliver¥' The prince, who
knew of the stepmother's cruelty, asked his wife to leave her right
hand print on a wall before accompanying her stepmother.

On the way, the stepmother and the stepdaughter rested'by an

old well. Just then the stepsister appeared, as planned by her mother.
The stepsister wanted to quench her thirst. She first praised the gold
ornaments of the stepdaughter, and wanted to wear them just once.
The pregnant girl gave the ornaments happily. Next when she bent
towards the well, the stepmother pushed her inside, and returned
home with her daughter.

lri the well was a huge snake. It asked the new entrant to the
well, "Who are you? Sister or wife?"

The girl replied, "I am your sister."

The snake accommodated her in the well and acted as her

midwife.

In the story of the fish king the elder queen, who was given
only the stone of the magical fruit by the younger queen, ate her share
without complaining: Both the queens delivered on the same. day - the
younger a boy and the elderone a fish.

Adoption is anoth'er theme of folktales. An old childless

couple adopted a child in a peculiar manner. One day the old woman
bought some berries from the market. When she was peeling them to
cook, one of the berries said, Please don't peel me. Accept me as a
son. I will do all your work like a son. The old lady, surprised by the
importuning berry, accepted it as her son.

In the story of seven brothers and a sister, the couple in a

village had seven sons, but craved for a daughter. They approached a
41)
sage, who gave them a beautiful flower. This was to be kept in a
closed pot for ten months. The couple did so, and at the end of ten
months found a beautiful girl child instead of the flower.

In spite of the availability of modem medical facilities all over

Tamil. Nadu, such as for deliveries, every village has it own midwife,
normally from a washerman f~i1y. Washerman is not a "caste but a
profession, low on the social hierarchy. Every community or caste has
its own washerman family, giving it exclusive service. The
'.
washerman household would be situated at the periphery of the
village.

The washermen also act as midwives, and also. serve as the

village grapevine. They also partially function as the indigenous
medical practitioners. For their services they are given cooked food
once a day (normally before dinner), grains during the harvest season,
clothing and money during festivals.

The process of pregnancy and labour is described succinctly in

the story of Chinnathambi as follows:

"Sivan's blessing-stopped Pulal's menses:

The month following she suffered sleepless nights and

faintness.

In month three a lustrous glow on her face.

'In month four was she seen stepping wearily,

when relations saw her adorned with ornaments fine,

And delicious plenty they bought to virtuousPulal ........

In month five was she in golden hues full

50
 when the kin brought her anklet and bangles meet.

In month six did they bring food to her taste.

In month .seven was held the pregnancy ceremony

in,splendour great and to the knowledge of all.

Month eight found Pulal in exhaustion.

Ninth it was and appetite she had lost

In month ten did Pulal suffer labour pain:

Came the midwife, came also the neighbours

pain intense, intense it became."

III. The lamp hides the child.

The nucleus tale introduces an important cultural element, the

oil-lamp, in the third ensemble. The distraught queen wants to save
her newborn baby from her husband's anger. A sudden thought
strikes her: why not ask the huge oil-lamp, which she had brought
from her natal house, for help?

Some etymology is in order here. The oil-lamp is addressed as

villakku nachivar, the lamp fairy. the word nachivar has a feminine
connotation and the suffix is a respectful vocative. A nachivar is a
female, neither a goddess nor an ordinary woman, but someone
in-between, a powerful woman. In spoken Tamil, women with
extraordinary qualities are referred to as nachivar.

5I
 Villakku nachivar appears in some other folktales as well, as a
do-gooder. In one tale, nachivar helps a couple to solve a
misunderstanding. The girl in this case knew thousands of songs, but
when she got married, she stopped singing. The songs chafed unsung.
They decided to leave her, but not without punishing her. One day
when the husband was away, they came out of her, and turned into a
pair of chapels in front of the 'house and a shirt on the clothes peg.
The husband, returning, was su~picious that his wife was harbouring a
paramour, and beat her. The wife, in distress, began to sing songs of
dejection. The husband, his anger still unquenched, went to the
village temple to sleep.

At the temple, the nachivar and a moth flying around it were

chatting. The moth asked why the man waS spending the night in the
temple rather than with his wife, and the nachivarmirthfully narrated
the entire incident. The husband when he heard the truth, felt
ashamed for himself and went back home. From that day he never
forgot to ask his wife to sing songs in the evenings.

In another tale, the nachivar comes to the' help of a poor

orphan who is mistakenly branded as a thief. The daughter of the rich
family where she worked as a servant-maid, suspected the girl of
being the lover of her uncle and was looking for a chance to drive her
out. The daughter had a long hair, decorated with thousands of pearls.
One day, a hen swallowed one of those pearls. When the daughter
found the pearl missing, accused the servant-maid of stealing it.
Meanwhile, her uncle from a nearby village came to visit them. That
night, the maid-servant prayed to the villakku nachivar for help in
clearing her name. Nachivar came in the uncle's dream and told him
what actually had happened. Next morning, the uncle found the pearl

52
10 the hen. While in these two tales the villakku nachivar aids
someone in distress., in. the nucleus tale she is an active participant.
Her role is mythical and symbolic. She becomes a shelter, a life saver
for the girl whose life is threatened by her own father.

The nachivar functions. as a shelter in. another tale, where a

brother and a sister have ron away from their cruel stepmother. The
brother found a job in a village and- looked after his sister. Once, the
sister found a fresh turmeric stem near her hut, and tempted by its
look, swallowed it. To her consternation, she became pregnant, but
the brother knew nothing of it. She gave birth to a beautiful girl child
at the end of her term, who had a complexion of turmeric. Abord that
her birth would suspect her chastity, she put the child into an
oil-lamp, and hanged herself.

In another tale, shelter is given by a wooden doll. In this tale,

a brother and a sister were driven from the house by their stepmother.
Walking through a forest, they found a road sign saying that no
brother and sister should go in the same direction. So they decided to
go in d'ifferent paths, but before parting made an agreement that their
children should marry each other if the brother got a ~on and the sister
a daughter. If the sister got a daughter there would be a shower of
pearls in the brother's house, and the sister would witness a shower of
gold if the brother was blessed with a son.

Many years later, the brother, learning that his sister had a
daughter, went in search of her house. They met joyfully, and began
arrangements for the marriage. But an astrologer, who studied the
horoscopes of the intended couple, predicted to the sister that
bridegroom would marry thrice, the first two of them dying early.
The sister therefore decided that her daughter would only become the

53
third wife of her nephew. Her daughter would remain in a wooden
doll and would emerge only when the first two wives died. She
coaxes her brother to fix the first two marriages as soon as possible.
She orders a wooden doll and places her daughter inside it with all
things n~cessary for her daily needs. She persuades her brother not to
reveal the truth prematurely.

Wooden doll is a familiar object in folktales, an evil force in

one. The tale is about a wooden doll given to their daughter by her
parents. When the girl, outgrows the age of playing with the doll, the
doll is resentful and kills everyone in that village one by one. When
the doll comes to kill her, the girl locks herself inside the house. The
doll breaks open the door. The terrified girl rushes to an old tree in
her backyard, and begs it for protection. The tree opens its trunk and
allows the girl to enter.

An oil lamp is an important symbol in Tamil culture, symbol

of the good fortune of a household. Named kuththu villakku, which
literally means a seated lamp, it has a round platform with a vertical
stem in its centre. On top of it is a shallow cup with cotton wicks
arranged evenly all round it. In the middle of the cup is a flame
shaped design attached vertically as an extension of the central stem.
Everyday at dawn, the eldest woman of the house will light this lamp
as a sign of inviting the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi. A widow or a
menstruating woman must not touch it. Coconut oil is the lighting
fuel. Since it is an inevitable accompaniment during rituals, the lamp
is kept near idols and icons.

There is a folktale which illustrates the auspicious nature of an

oil-lamp. A girl was married into a household which was so poor that
they had no money to buy oil to light the household lamp daily. The

. 54
new bride wanted to bring about a change in the fortunes of the
. ,
household. One day while the queen of that viUage was having bath a
crow took her chain and dropped it in this particular house. The king
then announced that whoever returned the chain would get any favour
they asked for. The girl, when. returning the chain to the king, asked
for a peculiar gift. She asked the king to order the village not to light
any oil-lamp on the following Friday. This was done. On that day, the
girl posted her husband at the front door, instructing him not to allow
anybody in without extracting a, promise that they would not leave the
house thereafter. She posted her brothers-in-law the back door
instructing them not to allow anyone out unless they promised that
they would never return to the house. The gIrl then lit the oil-lamp
and hundreds of tiny lamps in the house. When goddess Lakshmi
came for her daily visit, seeing the village in the dark, she felt
unwelcome. When she saw the only house well lit, she tried to enter.
The girl's husband stopped Lakshmi at the door, and asked her to
promise not to leave the house, which she did, and entered the house.
In the mean time, the bad fairies who had been in the house for a very
long time were uneasy at the sight of so many bright lights, and tried .
to leave throqgh the back door. There they were stopped and asked to
promise never to return, which they did. From that day the household
prospered.

IV.When the king asked about the child, the queen answered that
she had killed the girl child. But the child was inside the lamp.
She used to come out and eat food:

In this fourth ensemble the tale introduces two contradictory

desires--the desire of not having a girl child, and the desire to save the

55
child. The tale takes a new direction by placing the g,irl inside the
lamp and misinforming the king that she has been killed.

In another tale, where the father asks the mother to kill all the
four children, the mother saves them by herding them inside a
chicken coop. In the snake king story, the queen, who has delivered a
snake child, takes advantage of the sudden disappearance ofthe snake
child from the palace to hide the news of its birth.

Lives are also saved by peripheral characters through

dissimulation. In one tale, two demon sisters transfer themselves into
beautiful women, gain the sympathy of the king and his minister, eat
up the horses, elephants and cattle of the palace, and convinced the
king and the minister that their wives are to blame for these
happenings. On the king's orders the soldiers take both the women
who are pregnant, to the forest to kill them, but let them go free,
convinced of their innocence. On the way back, they kill a goat, and
dip their swords in its blood to satisfy the king that they have fulfilled
the assignment.

In another tale the king has three sons but wants a girl child.
After many years of austerity, the queen gives birth to a 'girl, who
however is a demon too and eatS animals. The king asks his first sons
one by one to investigate the matter but they fail. The third son,
<1,

assigned out the truth.

Intelligent and brave, he climbs a tree and watches over the

animal shed and the palace. Late in the' night, he sees something
rolling out of his sister's room towards the animal shed at an amazing
speed and return to the room within a few minutes. He runs to the
shed and sees pools of blood on the floor. He counts the animals and
finds some missing. He runs to the sister's room and finds her in bed
50
With blood stains on her mouth. But the king, when he hears this
disclosure, disbelieves his motive and, orders the soldiers to kill him.
The soldiers free him in the forest, stain their sword with the blood of
a squirrel and show it to the king.

Dissimulation
. may also be done to serve a. selfish motive, as
in the. take of the wife who pretended to' have been possessed by a
spirit. This couple was starving, and kept body and soul together by
. eating wild grass. One day, the husband got a job with a land owner,
who gave"him a bag of flour in advance. The happy husband asked
the wife to cook the flour. He also caught some fishes from the
temple pond and plucked two mangoes from a temple tree. Then he
went away to work. Meanwhile the wife, prepared the food was
getting ravenous. Waiting for her husband, she thought she would
taste just a morsel of the food. But before she realized it, she had
finished up everything. Now the dilemma was how to face the
husband. When he returned, she acted as if possessed by the local
. .
mother goddess. The pious husband started to pacify the spirit, who

. taking fishes and mangoes from the temple.

scolded him for . She
added' that what he had taken from the temple had to be returned at
once or. she would kill his wife. The husband told the spirit to take
back the fishes and mangoes herself. At once, his wife became
normal. The husband on entering the house found the cooking vessels
empty and believ~d the wife's concocted story_

v. They became poor and had nothing to eat. Be gambled and

drank. She even sol~ her'wedding chain:

In all folktales, which start with the king and the queen of a
village, there is mention o'f poverty. Kings suffer for lack of money

57
and good, even though they possess palaces, wives, soldiers, beautiful
gardens, etc.

In the nucleus tale, the king with ten girl children (the tenth
being in the lamp) lost all his property. To feed the children and the
king, the queen sold all valuables in the house, even her wedding
chain. The distraught king became a gambler and alcoholic.

Poverty is associated in Tamil culture with female progeny.

There is a saying, even a king wilt become a pauper if he has five girl
children. In this tale the king had ten girls. A girl child is seen as a
source of expense. Also, she is not considered as an active member of
her natal house. Till puberty she is not made aware of her sex, but
with puberty she is treated as a person who has· to leave her natal'
house and concern herself with the good fortune of her husband's
house.

The wedding chain is normally made of gold. It pendant,

made of gold, varies in design and size from one caste group to
another. The wedding chain, tied around the bride's neck at the
wedding ceremony by the bridegroom, is symbolic of the marriage
bond, and is heavily loaded with ritualistic values. The wedding chain
is the bride's fortune, destiny, and wealth. Any damage to it is
interpreted as a bad omen to the husband. Widows are not allowed to
wear it. Selling the wedding chain is taken to be an extreme measure
in dire circumstances.

Gambling and taking liquor are also connected with the

poverty of a family. Card playing is commonly seen in villages.
Every village has a place called oor madam (village mut), where the
males indulge in this pastime. Before card playing was introduced
during the colonial times, there used to be a local game, similar to
5X
cards, called adu-puli attam (goat-tiger game). Arrack is the country
liquor commonly distilled in the Tamil reg-ion. It has generally
replaced palm and coconut toddy as a popular alcoholic drink.

Folktales describe extremes of poverty. In one tale a poor

widow struggles to bring up her two children, a boy and a girl. she
used to work in neighbouring households and earn a little rice in
return. With this rice she made kQl?ii (gruel) for her children. She also
used to save a single grain of rice every day. All was well till the day
one of the children ate a handful of rice from the small hoard without
her knowledge.

In another tale, a widow with two children could not find

employment, she went to the village pond to fetch water to cook some
wild grass. On the way, she met a rich woman who used to be
troubled by bugs. The widow told her that she would relieve her of
her problem if she would give her some flour. The rich woman
accepted the service and recompensed her. But when the rich woman
reached her house, she found a bug in her head,. was angry that the
widow had not done her job well, came to her house, and broke the
pot in which she had cooked the flour. The distressed widow cried out
to God, who heard her anguished cry, came down and took her to
heaven. There he showed her a room full of valuables and asked her
to take her pick. The box was full of gold coins. Thereafter she
prospered. The rich woman, when she heard what had happened, also
cried out to God, who showed her the room full of valuables. She
took a huge box. When she opened it, thousands of pOIsonous
creatures leapt out of it, and killed the entire household.

It may be seen that poverty is brought about and also rei ieved
through the agency of supernatural beings. This is brought out in

5')
 another tale of two sisters. The younger one married to a rich man
and the elder to a poor man. After a year of marriage, when the
younger sister visits the other, she is dismayed to see the poverty
there. The elder sister does not know why her household is poor.
They prepare good food regularly, she says, but she does not know
where it goes. That evening, when the elder sister begins cooking, the
younger sister tells her to light a lamp and not cook in the dark. The
other replies, because they cannot afford the oil. But the sister insists,
and the lamp is lit. This is the first time a 'lamp has been li't there.
Then they have dinner in the lamp light. The elder sister is surprised
to see that half the food is left over. Late in the night, the sisters hear
voices in the house. Two hungry devils are in conversation,
. complaining that the younger sister deprived them of food by lighting
. the lamp. Hitherto, they had been daily gorging themselves on the
household food in the dark. They decide td leave the house where the
light of the lamp will be a regular feature.

VI. The king told the queen to cook rice. She replied that there
was nothing to cook. The king told her to sell the oil-lamp:

Rice, the staple food in Tamil Nadu, also forms a staple motif
of folktales. A cherished commodity, it is also part of daily
conversation. Food items like idli and dosa, made from rice dough,
;;

are considered to be delicacies in villages.

In the story of the hard-working widow with two children,

who has saved up a little rice, one day the boy returns from school
and asks his sister for food. She takes a handful of rice from the littie
hoard of rice and makes gruel for him. The mother, when she returns,
discovers what has happened, and in fury beats the children with a .
ladle, injuring the boy on the ·head. The next day, the children run
away from home.

In another folktale, a stepmother gives a single grain of rice

and corn to her stepdaughter to cook. The helpless girl prays to her
dead mother, who helps her to cook two vessels full of rice and cOrn
with those two grains. When the girl's brother returns from school he
asks her for food. She serves him rice. Meanwhile the stepmother
returns, finds the boy eating, cOncludes that the girl has cooked more
rice than was allotted' to her, and drives away the children from the
house.

In this tale, the stepmother gives an order which stepdaughter

cannot fulfil. Her mother then comes to the child's aid. In the nucleus
tale, the king gives an order which the queen cannot fulfil--to sell the
lamp--because her daughter is hidden inside the lamp. She prefers to
dispose of her wedding chain, which, after all, signifies an affinal
relationship, rather than the oil-lamp, which signifies a
consanguineous relationship. In . comparison with the blood
relationship she no longer considers the affinal bond as a sacred and
incontestable.

For an indication of the value judgements revealed by this

tale, we may look into the family background of the story teller,
Velladuraichi, .herself living in village Tenmalai, 70 kilometres from
the district headquarters, Tirunelveli, Velladuraichi, in her early
forties, is an agricultural labourer. She belongs to an untouchable
scheduled caste, Pallar, living on the periphery of the village. A
Roman Catholic, she was born In village Vathirayiruppu, 20
kilometres from Tenmalai.. she has had no formal education but has
attained marginal literacy. She is the second wife of her husband, who

. (i I
is twenty years older than her. She has two stepdaughters and three
girls of her own.

The stories were told to me on three consecutive nights, the

sessions lasting till midnight. Velladuraichi was accompanied by her
four daughters, two women from' the neighbourhood, and two boys.
The girls showed great interest in the proceedings, correcting his
mother over details and helping' her to maintain the story line. They
had heard these tales early childhood. Once Velladuraichi asked her
younger daughter to tell a particular tale, whom she considered to be
a good story teller.

Her husband, whom I knew rather well, never showed an

interest in the matter. Velladuraichi herself referred to him as old
man, one who wears glasses, etc, She commented that he never stayed
in the house, coming home only for food, preferring to spend time
outside the house conversing with neighbours in his leisure time. The
story-teller'S affinity with her girl children and her capricious
relationship with the husband may be noted for the bearing they have
on the construction of the story.

The king's asking the queen 'to sell the oil-lamp, the only
object of value left in the house, is echoed even in the ancient Tamil
epic, Sillappalhikaram (the epic of the anklet), written in the second
century by prince I1ango AdigaI. The valuable object in this epic is a
silamhu (anklet), made up of gold and studded with emeralds. In this
epic a householder, besotted with a court dancer for more than five
years, loses all his wealth except an anklet of his wife. When,
repentant he returns to his house to start a new life with his wife,
there is nothing of value in the house. The wife gives him the anklet
to sell and buy provisions. But the king's soldiers, taking him for a
thief, arrest him. He is then condemned by the king. The
grief-stricken wife later proves her husband's innocence, and curses
the whole city for having been unfair to her husband.

In another tale, a widow who finds the going hard calls her
young son, and gives him all the valuables in the house to sell. He
collects three hundred rupees from the sale and buys a cow as
instructed by her.

In still another tale, a wife sends her husband with a thousand

rupees, her savings of more than a year, to buy a cow. It takes two
days to reach the market. He spends the first night in a house where
the housewife, learning that he is carrying a thousand rupees, decides
to trick him out of the money. She makes a passing reference to a
magical pot in her possession which supplies an endless amount of
food. The man, tempted, cajoles her to give him the pot for a
thousand rupees. She pretends to be persuaded and sells him the pot.
When he reaches home, the man finds that the pot has no magical
powers as claimed. He goes back to return it, but hears the woman's
husband's angry voice who is scolding her for giving away the pot.
The pot, he says, would lose its magical PC?wer if it is given to anyone
other than the house, and shouts that he will kill whoever has taken
away their good fortune. The credulous man returns to his house and
tells the whole incident to his wife.

VII. With her child inside the lamp, the queen decided to take the
lamp back to her natal house:

The queen cannot sell the lamp without endangering her

child's life. As a last resort, she decides to return it to her natal house.
h was her brother, the child's maternal uncle who had gifted the
lamp. The brother's gift to the sister for her marriage or on any other
occasion is, unlike anyone else's gift, loaded with cultural and social
meaning in Tamil society.

The maternal uncle's relationship with his niece is unique. In

all life cycle ceremonies of a girl, her maternal uncle has an active
role and participation, stressing his social commitments and cultural
dominance. He has the first claim on the hand of his niece in
marriage. He should be the first person to be consulted on the girl's
marriage. Regional variations b'etweenvarious caste groups in Tamil
Nadu in this matter are negligible.

In Tamil society the br~ther of the bride is expected to meet

all the expenses of marriage, including basic household goods for the
newly married couple. While both the mother's brother and father's
sister's husband are maman, m'other's brother is distinctively called
Thai maman (maternal uncle). His authority over the nephews and
"
nieces is predominant. His cult~ral right over the girl exceeds even
that of her parents.

When the sister's first chi Id turns out to be a girl, the new
infant's uncle celebrates the new 'assignment of being her maternal
uncle, The baby is de~ked up with the garments, ornamentS, etc, that
he provides. He has also the right of providing the first weaning food
to the baby. From that day he looks after all the expenses of the baby.

The girl's next life-cycle ceremony is the ear-ring ceremony.

Though the girl's father does the necessary arrangements for this
ceremony, the major role is played by the maternal uncle. He takes
care of the expenses. The child is kept in his lap during the rituals. He
buys her dress and ear-rings. If he does not fulfil these functions,
naturally he loses cultural claims over the girl.
 The puberty ceremony, which is the third and major life-cycle
ceremony for the girl, totally transforms her into a woman, restricting
her mobility, social functions and behaviour with an entirely new set
of social regulations. The maternal uncle comes to her house
accompanied by his relatives to celebrate the event. He gives ber a
saree to wear, the first that the new woman wears. In all rituals of the
puberty ceremony, the maternal uncle is given greater importance
than the girl's father or mother. Generally, the girl's betrothal is
decided during these ceremonies. The maternal uncle broaches the
subject if he has sons to marry or for himself if he is young and
unmarried. The paternal uncle gets his chance to propose for his'son
if only both possibilities are ruled out in the case of the maternal
uncle. Others get their chance to propose in order of socially set
preferences.

The maternal uncle's social role IS invested with

well-structured cultural sanctions and prohibitions. The oil-lamp
given by the queen's brother signifies his cultural role. Keeping the
girl within the oil-lamp signifies putting the girl under the protection
of the maternal Wiele, affirming his cultural rights and .role, and
discouraging patriarchy.

In the tale where the brother and sister agree to a marital

alliance between their offspring the power role of the maternal uncle
is made crystal clear. Even the girl's mother has no voice when the
maternal uncle demands thegirI as bride for his son. This complicity,
not explicated in the tale as a cultural practice, is reasoned out as an
agreement made between sister and brother. Primarily, culture is a set
of agreements within a society. Each member of the society accepts

,
these agreements, and begins to operate within spaces provided to
-
him. When the maternal uncle brin~s his mece in the form of a
wooden doll, there is laught~rin the village about these goings-on.
His relatives too are displeased and his son, the bridegroom, cries that
by bringing a wooden doll as his bride his father has mined his life
for the sake of his sister. He insists his father to arrange another
match, which is exactly what the father wanted to save his niece's
life.

The nuances of a brother-sister relationship are also

highlighted in a large number of folktales. In the above folktale, the
brother and the sister, fleeing their stepmother's cruelty, find a stone
inscription in the forest directing them to part ways. The implication,
to judge from another tale, is that they cannot live together.

This tale tells about a brother and a sister living in a village

living affectionately. The sister's beauty and charm was such that her
brother was enamoured of her and one day, he told openly that he was
in love with her. The sister, annoyed, explained to him patiently why
not possible, but he would not listen. He chased after her. The chase
brought them to. the sea shore. The sister stepped into the sea and
became a wave. The brother, still chasing her, also became a wave
and pursued his hunt. Their chase has become eternal, the sister wave
being always one step ahead of the brother wave. This is why the
waves are always chasing one another. If any day the brother wave
manages to catch the sister wave, that will be dooms day for the
world.

There IS still another tale, popularly called the tale of the

seven brothers and a sister, which explores the brother-sister
relationship. In this tale, as couple who had seven sons but no girl
child, after a series of austerities got a girl child. They treasured her.
One day the girl went ,to the fields to give food to her brothers. Their
field was on the other side of the river. A huge fish in the river ferried
people to cross the river in return for some' food.' Unfortunately, the
girl forgot to keep food for the fish. When she tried to trick the fish
by serving it mud balls it became angry and hit her with its tail. The
embarrassed girl mischievously blamed the youngest brother for her
wound. The mother, believing her became angry and poisoned the
boy. On the girl's marriage day, they could not find even a single
flower for the wedding. After a long search they found some flowers
on the dead brother's grave. It was his way of reminding them of the
injustice that had been done to him.

The seven brothers and a sister motif appears in another tale

where one of the brothers is lame. One day, when the sister went to
the forest to gather berries, a tiger took her away. The brothers, when
they came to know this, went to the forest to bring their sister back,
including the lame brother, who insisted on accompanying their sister
captive in the tiger's cave. The tiger had gone away to hunt. The
brothers wanted to deal face to face with the tiger, and waited. The
tiger returned and asked the girl to serve food. when the tiger was
eating, the brothers attacked it from all directions and drove it away:

Vill. Her nephew saw the queen coming, for first time after her
marriage:

A significant cultural character as well as an active protagonist

of the tale is introduced in this ensemble, the queen's brother's son.
In Tamil kinship terminological system the brother's son, sister's son,
and daughter's husband all called manlmakan (manl - other, makan-
son). The corresponding females are marumakal (makal - daughter).
Individuals who have the cuitural right to claim marital relationship
with their offspring are also marumakan for father and mother.

The manlmakan sees his aunt as visiting her house for'the first
time after marriage. A married girl does not normally pay an informal
visit to her natal home. Such a visit implies that she is having
problems, which could be anything ranging from misunderstanding
with her husband to economic woes. In this tale, the statement that it
was the first time she was visiting her natal home does not mean that
she had no communication with him, but implies that this was the
first time .she .came with a purpose. The troubled (marumakan
repeatedly asks her, What brings you here altai (father's sister), what
brings you here?

The theme of the visit of a sister in distress to her brother is

the focus of the story of Nallathangal, which is popular in the form of
ballad and folk theatre. Nallathangal was married to a king. They had
seven children and lived happily. Once their country experienced
severe draught which continued for years. The couple de~ided to send
the children to their maternal uncle's house. Nallathangal brought
them to her brother's palace. The brother's wife saw them coming.
She did not want them at her place and ordered the servants to close
the doors. Nallathangal called to the servants to open the doors but
they answered that they were told not to open the door for beggars.
Nallathangal swallowed the humiliation and' explained that she was
the king's sister, but they replied that as the king was not in the
palace, the queen had ordered them not to allow them in. Nallathangal
was with her children. On the way she threw her seven children one
and daughter's husband all called marumakan (manJ - other, makan-
son). The corresponding females are manJmakal (makal - daughter).
Individuals who have the cultUral right to claim marital relationship
with their offspring are also marumakan for father and mother: '!'

The marumakan sees his aunt as visiting her house for the first
time after marriage. A married girJdoes not normally pay an informal
visit to her natal home. Such a visit implies that she is having
problems, which could be anything ranging from misunderstanding
with her husband to economic woes. In this tale, the statement that it
was the first time she was visiting her natal home does not mean that
she had no communication with him, but implies that this was the
first time she came with a purpose. The troubled (marumakan
repeatedly asks her, What brings you here allai (father's sister), what
brings you here?

The theme of the visit of a sister in distress to her brother is

the focus of the story of Nallathangal, which is popular in the form of
ballad and folk theatre. Nallathangal was married to a king. They had
seven children and lived happily. Once their country experienced
severe draught which continued for years. The couple decided to send
the children to their maternal uncle's house. NaJIathangal brought
them to her brother's palace. The brother's wife saw them coming.
She did not want them at her place and ordered the servants to close
the doors. Nallathangal called to the servants to open the doors but
they answered that they were told not to open the door for beggars.
Nallathangal swallowed the humiliation and explained that she was
the king's sister, but they replied that as the king was not in the
palace, the queen had ordered them not to allow them in. Nallathangal
was with her children. On the way she threw her seven children one

Mi
by one into a deserted well, and finally killed herself. When her
brother returned home, he was told about NallathangaI's tragic end.
Later, he found out the truth from the servants and punished his wife
severely.

In the folk ballad about twins, the sister undergoes a similar

mortifying experience. The twins are a local deity worshipped in and
round Coimbatore district The heroine of the story was from a rich
family, but her husband came from a poor family, and worked in the
king's court. to make matters worse, the couple had no children for
more than fourteen years. The girl's brothers, all of them married and
well off, looked down upon their sister and her husband.

One day the sister heard the news about the naming ceremony
of her brother's son. She went there with gifts, though she had not
been invited. It is a popular belief that children would fall ill if they
are touched by a childless woman. Therefore, when she entered the
town, her sisters-in-law began to worry about their children's health.
They closed the doors and ordered the soldiers to send her back. when
the girl found the doors closed, she was inconsolable. She cursed her
brother's families, and began to pray God incessantly children. God,
who finally heard her prayer, granted her twins, a boy and a girl.

The brother-sister relationship can sour after the brother's

marriage, since the new bride sees the sister as a rival to her power
position within the family structure. The following folktale illustrates
this rivalry:

There were seven brothers and a young sister in a village. All

the brothers were married but the sister was yet to be married. They
had all been saving up for her marriage, but when they discovered
that they had not saved up enough in spite of all their efforts, they
decided to go to distant towns to earn more. But their wives resented
all this. As it is they were not well off and they did not want their
sister~in-Iaw to be a drain on their family finances. So they chased her
away. They told their husbands on their return she had eloped.

While the marumakan as the brother's son is encouraged to be

sympathetic to his paternal aunt, Tamil culture has a horror' of any
emotional bond between marumakan (son-in-law) and mother-in-law.
Many taboos surround this relationship. The mother-in-law must not
come before her marumakan and must remain inside the house when
he is around. But in a village society, where this is not feasible
because every capable person must earn his or her own livelihood, the
mother-in-law and marumakan are allowed to converse. Other
restrictions are, however, strictly followed.

Among the folklore insinuating an illicit relationship between

mother-in-law and ma~umakanis the following. A husband asked his
wife for curry while having lunch. She retorted that he could eat his
male organ for curry. He started eating a vadai, which he had kept in
his lap, making it appear that he was eating his male organ. The wife
was shocked. She wanted to confirm her fears, and he did this by
exposing himself. He tied his organ tightly to his body, so that it
looked like it was missing. The wife began to weep that her
foolishness had brought about this loss. The husband sought to
console her and said that his organ could be restored but it would cost
two thousand rupees. The wife then rushed to her natal home and
brought four thousand rupees. Next morning the husband went to
town to get a new organ, indulged himself there for almost two
months, and having blown away this small fortune returned home.
During his absence from home, his mother-in-law had come to give

7()
 company to her daughter. When' he reached home his wife had gone
out. The mother-in-law received him, gave him food, and then asked
if the treatment in the town had been successful. He assured her on
that count but she wanted to see for herself. Marumakan showed her
and tested its quality on her. From that day, marumakan was called
. altai kondan (one who has had conquest of his mother-in-law).

IX. She narrated her woes to marumakan. She asked for a

hundred rupees for the oil-lamp. Marumakan gave her five
hundred rupees:

The queen pawned the lamp to her marumakan without telling

him about the girl inside the lamp. Pawning is a common practice in
Tamil society. Normally pawn brokers loan half the value of the
object pawned. The pawn broker has no right to sell the pawned
object but may use it. If the owner of the pawned object returns the
loan with interest due within the specified period, the pawn broker
should return the object. If the. owner does not come to r~deem the
pawn the broker will convey to the owner that since tQe latter has not
been able to redeem the pawn, he (the broker) has now become the
owner.

People also may be pawned, giving the broker the right over
their labour. The monetary worth of their labour is calculated and
deducted from the principal and interest due. The pawned human
beings become free only when this loan obligation is cleared. They
are also called bonded labour. In Tamil Nadu children aged six or
seven are pawned, and farmed out by the brokers as industrial labour

71
 in match and fireworks industries or put to work in quarries, cashew
orchards, tamarind orchards, etc.

In one tale, a young man pawns his sister to a prince to

acquire a ship. The young man's mother looked after her son and
daughter by selling vadais. One day the prince of the place, who was
a friend of the youth, decided to visit distant countries and asked the
servants to arrange a ship. This idea excited the youth. He too desired
to voyage to distant lands on his own ship. He pleaded with the prince
for a ship. The prince acceded to his request on condition that he
would pawn his sister as a servant in the palace. The young man did
this and within a day, began the voyage with the prince on his own
. ship.

In another tale; an impoverished and destitute king submits his only

son to a neighbouring king to repay a loan. After many years of
working in the palace as a servant, the young man has finally cleared
his father's loan. One day his master calls him and tells that he is free
to leave his service as the debt has been cleared. He also gives him a
thousand rupees as gift. Meanwhile the king's daughter has fallen in
love with the young man. When she hears about his imminent
departure, she expresses her love for him and asks him to marry her.
The young man refuses because as a poor man he is not a worthy
match for her. But the princess is adamant and threatens suicide. So
the young man elopes with her. r-

72
 Sequence Two;

X. The girl stayed In her uncle's house within the lamp.

Marumakan was looking for a bride. The girl used to take food
after making sure that there was nobody around.

Together with the lamp, the girl has been transferred to her
uncle's house, her presence unknown to anyone except the queen who
has returned to the palace with the money.

The story of the girl inside the wooden doll has similarities
with the nucleus tale not only at the level of motif but also in
characters and their functions. The facts about the girl inside the
wooden doll and her beauty are kept secret until one day an oil
merchant accidentally sees her coming out of the wooden cover. In
both this tale and the nucleus tale the girls are put in camouflage
. objects by their mothers and sent to the uncle's house. Then they are
married to marumakan. In the story of the wooden doll the motivation
for the camouflage is obviously to facilitate marriage. In the nucleus
tale, the idea is obliquely hinted at. The marumakan '.'I cultural right to
marry the lamp girl is also subtly put across.

In the story of the vindictive wooden doll, the fugitive girl is

given shelter by a tree. The wooden doll breaks the tree in two and
throws it in the river. A prince and his friend find the broken tree
following in the current and plant the two parts in their courtyard.
Later, the prince's friend discovers the girl when she takes food. He
accepts her as a servant-maid.

In the story of the turmeric girl, the existence of the girl inside
the lamp is discovered by a servant-maid. A different kind of secret is
discovered in the tale of the demon girl by her own brother. In some

71
other tales, persons born as animals later change into human beings,
in most cases, with marriage. The fish prince was forced to come out
of his fish cover by his wife. Similar things happen to the tortoise
prince, the frog prince, and the snake prince.

Mostly, the girls in hiding survive by stealing food. The girl in

the lamp finds food when all have gone out, and the fact of the
missing food is noticed by her cousin. The girl inside the tree is
similarly discovered by the prince's friend. The turmeric girl inside
the lamp is discovered by a servant-maid.

Stealing food is an important motif in folktales. In one tale, a

woman selling saIt steals food from a house, and later becomes the
mistress of the house. Until her arrival on the scene, the daughter of
the house, who· has lost her mother, cooks for her father. The
salt-seller begins to steal food from the house and spoils the rest by
mixing hair in it. The father regularly scolds the girl for not taking
good care of the food. In the story of the impoverished elder sister,
two demons steal food in the conducive circumstances provided by
the unlit house. The girl who becomes a demon during the night rolls
down as a ball towards the cattle shed when everyone has gone to
sleep and devours the cattle there.

The story of the headless thief is also worsen around the

theme of stealing food. In this story, a father starts stealing to save his
family from starving. One day he finds sacks of vegetables arrayed in
a r~om and plans to steal a few sacks. He goes to steal accompanied
by his son at night. They enter the room by making a hole in the wall.
The father gives a sack to his son to deliver at home. When he was
left, the father finds, a pot full of cooked rice and eagerly begins to
eat it. When the son returns and urges his father to escape, the latter,

74
gorging himself, does not give heed. When finally the father finishes
.
the pot and tries to come out, his distended belly blocks his exit. Soon
morning is upon them and the son hears foot steps approaching.
Without hesitation, to erase the identity of his father and thus to
safeguard his family, the son cuts of his father's head and returns
home.

Another tale is about a daughter-in-law who is always hungry

because her mother-in-law gives her only limited quantity of food.
One day, when the mother-in-law goes to a nearby village, the
daughter-in-law cooks a big vessel full of food and gorges herself..
Late in the evening, her stomach is in turmoil. She rushes to the fields
to relieve herself and excretes almost a cartload. She is astounded at
the mound of faeces that she has discharged and in the confusion
returns home leaving her lamp over the mound. Passersby mistake
this structure for a. new temple.· The mother-in-law, hearing of the
new temple, visits it and discovers the truth because she can recognize
the lamp. Jealous, she decides to erect her own temple. Meanwhile,
the king also has come to know about the mound of faeces and orders
his soldiers to catch the culprit. When the mother-in-law tries to
repeat the experiment, the soldiers catch her and produce her before
the king.

XI. The suspicion. The servant-maid and her duties~ The servant-
maid placed the lamp in marumakan's room:

Suspicion enters as an element. The cousin, who noticed

traces left by the girl, decided to find out the truth. A new character, a
servant-maid is introduced, with details concerning her duties.

75
 Suspis;ion operates as a major element in folktales. ]t puts
chafactefs -in critical situat-ions, makes them -perform major events,
reveal secrets, and in most cases through the emergence of suspicious
dramatis personae begin to group protagonists versus antagonists. In
the story of the vindictive wooden doll, the prince's friend discOvers
that the amount of food that he had kept in the vessel has diminished
and concludes that someone has eaten it in his absence. His suspicion
is confirmed in the ensuing days. The turmeric girl is discovered by a
woman from the neighbourhood. The girl, in addition to eating, did
household tasks of her uncle, cleaning the rooms, ,making the bed, and
cooking. The uncle is under the impression that these tasks havecbeen
done by the-neighbour woman, who occasionally helped in the house
and also had a secret wish to marry him. The woman, discovering that
household work has been done _in her absence, grows suspicious that
someone is there.

In the story of the salt selling woman, there is clear evidences

that an outsider has done this mischief. But the father is angry that his
daughter is not keeping the food safe from domestic animals. But
when the mischief continues, his suspicious change direction and he
decides to catch the mischief-monger.

In the story of the demon sister, suspicion brought the death

penalty to the third prince. Though fortuitously escaped death, it is
clear that his disclosure of his suspicion brought him to this calamity.
More discerning and pragmatic was the king, whose wife's
stepmother spirits away the queen and sends her own daughter to take
her place. When the king asks the girl to match the hand marks of his
wife, tl)ey do not match, The king's suspicion is thus confirmed, but
he maintains his equanimity because it is more important for him to
get back his wife before punishing the wicked stepmother and
stepsister. He sends his soldiersaH over -the world to find his wife.

Another tale tells of a suspicious. She used to send her

stepdaughter to graze cattle giving her a single grain of rice ,and a
single drop of water for lunch. But the'poor girl's mother helped her
by showing her a cucumber creeper, which helped her maintain good
health . .And it was the stepsister, who received nutritious food from
her mother, who weak. This made the stepmother suspicious who sent
her daughter to find out the truth.

Servant-maids are important characters in folktales. The

nature of their work is almost similar in all tales, ranging from
cooking, washing, cleaning, and other household tasks. They perform
major functions that help the protagonists or antagonists.

In one tale, a childless king gives a magical fruit to his queen.

- I
The queen eats the pulp and throws out the rest. A dog eats it. Both
the dog and the queen conceive simultaneously. The queen ddivers
two pups while the dog delivers two babies. The queen, seeing that
she has delivered pups which the dog has babies, seeks the assistance
of the servant-maid to exchange the offspring. But the dog does npt
allow her to touch the babies. The news reaches the king, who orders
the dog to be killed.

In the story of the tortoise prince the maid-servant assumes a

partly antagonistic role. The childless king has married a second time,
sending the first wife to another palace with a servant-maid. One day
a sage gives a magical fruit to the king that would make his wives
pregnant. The second wife eats the pulp and sends the skin and stone
to the first wife. The servant-maid eats the skin, leaving only the
stone for the first wife. They all conceive simultaneously. The second
77
wife delivers a son, the servant-maid a daughter, and the first wife a
tortoise.

XU. Marumakan found the girl coming out of the lamp and
thought, she should be our attai's daughter. This he decided not
to reveal:

This ensemble describes the way the cousin found out the
truth about the girl. When he saw food scattered all over the kitchen,
he suspected that some outsider was coming there. He never expected
it to be a girl residing in the lamp. The servant-maid who rearranged
the room shifted the lamp to his room. He watched the girl come out
of the lamp and eat the leftovers. she was so beautiful, her hair was
sixteen foot long. He concluded that it must be his altai's daughter.

Watching someone without their knowledge is part of the

theme of many tales. The girl inside the wooden d<)ll had no fear that
her secret would be revealed. As usual, when she finished her work in
the house and in the fields, she went to the river for a bath. After
making sure that no one was following her and no one was around,
she removed the wooden cover. She applied oil to her long hair and
stepped into the water. But unknown to her, an oil-merchant had seen
her. He had come home early that day and he saw the wooden doll
come along the river. He saw her remove the wooden cover. The
oil:-merchant could not believe his eyes because she was beautiful and.
her hair was sixteen foot long. He ran towards the village to tell of his
discovery to the bridegroom. Through him the secret about the
wooden doll came to light.

7X
 In the story of the lamp girl the neighbour woman hides
behind a door, and when the girl comes out of the lamp catches her by
her hands. The girl was beautiful, and her work was very neat and
clean. She had an ethereal look, with a turmeric complexion. The girl,
frightened by her unexpected discovery, sobs her story to the woman.

In the story of the vindictive wooden. doll, the prince's friend

decided to find out who was eating the food and hid himself. To his
amazement, he saw a girl came out of the tree and cautiously enter the
house in a hurry. She opened the dish and started eating. The friend
came out of hiding and grabbed her, n'ot allowing her to escape. The
girl told him her story. He was moved and felt sorry for her. He
assumed responsibility for her and introduced her to the prince as an
orphan.

In the stories of the fish prince and tortoise prince, the real
identity of the princes is found out by their respective wives and
mothers unexpectedly.

The fish prince was married to a girl after a series of painful

negotiations since no one w~ willing to give their daughter in
marriage to the fish prince. His mother therefore announced the offer
of a sack full of gold coins to the parents of any girl who would
marry her son. Hearing of its offer, a stepmother in a remote village
pressurized her husband to offer her stepdaughter to the fish prince in
marriage.

One day, the fish prince asked his wife to prepare hot water
for bath. She did so, but was very slow in leaving the place. When she
saw the real prince coming out of the fish cover, she ran to tell her
mother-in-law. The latter advised her to destroy the fish cover

79
 immediately. The girl was haOppy to do it. The prince, when he found
his fish cover in ashes, remained in his human form that day onwards.

In the story of the tortoise prince, the mother found out even
before his marriage, in similar circumstances. She burned the tortoise
shell but the prince told her it was not the right time to reveal his
identity. He wanted to be in tortoise form till his marriage. On his
. wish, the mother applied charcoal powder over his body and turned
him once again into a tortoise.

In the story of the salt selling woman the father hides in the
house to find out the mischief maker. When he catches her, he starts
beating her severely. The woman falls at his feet, begging for mercy.
When he stops beating her she asks him to marry her so that she can
take care of the household jobs happily. The father marries her.

Watch,ingother persons without their knowledge either by

\.

premeditation or accidentally changed the life of both the watcher and

the watched, sometimes dramat.ically. In one tale, the life of youth
who accidentally watched seven girls from heaven, changed beyond
imagination .. He was the youngest of four brothers. One day ,the father
asked his sons about their goal in life. The first three said that they
would like to work in the field, but the fourth son told that he would
I ike to relax: on a decorated bed, surrounded by four beautiful girls in
a beautiful palace. The father, agitated at this answer, drove him away
from the house.

He travelled through the woods, and saw a small hut. He

asked the old lady in that hut to allow him to stay there. she gave him
food after she heard his story. He stayed there for three days. The
desire to have four girls and a beautiful palace was burning within
him. One day when he was roaming through the woods around
,
the
X()
 o

old lady's hut he saw seven beautiful girls descend from heaven.
They landed near a pond, and started bathing. They frolicked in the
water for more than an hour and went back, without knowing that
they were being watched. Immediately the youth ran to the old
woman to get more information.

Watching an incident, sometimes, made the watcher forget

what he was about. This is comically illustrated in the tale of a thief
l .
who tries to burgle the palace. He scales the palace wall with a rope.
When he is halfway through, a light comes on in a room on the first
floor. He sees through the window the prince with his first wife. The
prince, married to two women, has decided to sort out their jealously
. by staying with each of them for a full month. At that fateful hour,
when our thief is witness to the royal problems, the prince is about to
leave the first wife because the new month has begun at that hour.
The first wife lets him go reluctantly, and the prince begins to climb
down the stairs to be with his second wife. At that moment, the first
wife happens to look at the calendar and realizes that month has one
more day. She shrieks asking the prince to come up because her turn
is not over yet. He starts climbing up once again, but the second wife,
eagerly waiting for him, pulls him down by his legs. The first wife
grabs him by the hair, trying to pull him up.

The thief, watching the scene, has forgotten his mission and is
all agog to see the denouement of this royal battle. The matter ends
only when the queens are told that day has broken. Meanwhile the
soldiers find the eavesdropping burglar. He is brought before the
king. The prince counsels the king to arrange two wives for the
burglar as punishment. The thief faints in fear.

XI
 There is also a tale that devolves entirely around the act of
surveillance: A king and his minister once put a young girl under
surveillance to check her ability to subvert vigilance. The story begins
with girl's remark over another girl who was punished for adultery.
The girl commented that it was foolish and added that she should·not
have even thought of adultery if she did not know how to cheat. The
king and the minister decided to test her ability to cheat.

The king married the girl and put her in a place where no one
could enter without his pennission except the minister and a
servant-maid. The king and the minister followed her movements
round the clock. But the girl one day secreted the servant-maid's son
into the palace and had intercourse with him. The king thought it was
the minister and the minister thought it was the king. The girl kept the .
servant-maid's son hidden in a wooden box.

One day the king and the minister saw two saints travelling
through air. They landed to have bath. Before the bath they united
their long hair and from each one's hair a woman emerged. But there
was a greater shock in store from them. The women themselves had
young men hidden in their saris.

Having seen for hims~lf how easily people could deceive the
world, the minister was now convinced of the girl's worldly wisdom.
He took the king to the palace and found the servant-maid's son in the
box. Having realized his folly, the king allowed the girl to marry the
servant-maid's son.

Another tale with a similar theme is where a king puts his only
daughter under vigilance to keep her a virgin. She was made to live in
a ten-storeyed building where no male was allowed. All the servants
were female. The girl was not allowed to go out or talk with anyone
X2
outside. Whatever she wanted was made available in the palace. Her
movements were continuously watched and reported to the king. 'One
early morning, when the girl stood near the window, the girl lost her
heart to the elegance of the morning sun who was beautiful yellowish
red. The sun also was fascinated by her beauty and impregnated her.
The news of the girl's pregnancy reached the king. Ashamed and
angry, he had all the servant-maids killed and his daughter out of the
kingdom.

XID. The servant-maid saw the girl. She fabricated a scandal.

Not only the cousin but the servant-maid also saw the girl
inside the lamp. She expected the cousin to broadcast the news about,
and his silence frustrated her. Normally, the discovery of a young
and beautiful girl living in a lamp is enough to excite people, but she
wanted to make a scandal of it.
A scandal may be fabricated merely as a piece of gossip or
with malicious intent, the latter being caused by fear, desire, anger,
etc. Thus, a concocted story may give pleasure for both its fabricator
.and the listener but the motivated story serves additional functions.

In the lamp girl's tale, the servant-maid approaches the

uncle's wife and seeks to rouse her jealousy. In the telling, the
newcomer becomes a beautiful girl, who has been smuggled inside
the house through the oil lamp to take the uncle's wife's position. The
girl is a threat to the uncle's wife's place in the household. In
concocting these details, the servant-maid will not gain anything.

In another tale, the younger sister fabricates a complaint

against the elder sister of whom she is jealous. The younger daughter

X3
IS proud and arrogant while the elder is calm, beautiful B:Ild
philanthropic. Everyone loves the elder sister and scorns the younger
one. The parents, however, have a soft comer for the younger child.
One day, the younger sister tries to pluck a rose but falls on the thorn
bush. She blames her scratches and bruises on her elder sister's
malice, saying that she pushed her into the bush. The angry parents
scold the elder sister and drive her out.

In the story of the seven brothers and a sister, as we have seen,

the sister blames the youngest brother, which- results in his being
poisoned by angry mother.

In fabricating a story an isolated event is taken and placed in

an invented context. In the story of the v~ndictive wooden doll, the
girl, who has now been assigned as a servant-maid to the prince, is
one day standing in front of the house when a chameleon falls on her,
leaving scratches on her face and hands. The prince and his friend
conclude that she has a lover who has left these, marks on her in the
heat of sexual dalliance, and drive her from the house, condemning
her 'as prostitute. In the story of the missing pearl, the girl readily
blames the servant-maid of the house for the loss of the pearl, since
she is bent for chasing away the girl from the house.

XIV. The uncle's wife planned to do away with the girl:

The uncle's wife, disturbed about the news of the lamp girl,
weaves a plan to eliminate her. She is happy that her husband does
not know about the presence of the girl in the house. She believes that
her husband's sister would have sent this lamp with her daughter as

84
part of a plan to grab the wealth of the house. she in him has the duty
to keep her in-laws' house safe.

Similar kind of restlessness and fear are. expressed in some

other tales. In the story of Nallathangal, her brother's wife saw her
coming towards their house with seven children. Fearing a threat to
her power position, she orders the soldiers to lock the door and not to
allow them in. A similar order was given by the brother's wife in the
story of twins' when the sister comes to their house for their
daughter's naming ceremony.

In the nucleus tale the uncle's wife wants to get possession of

the lamp in order to remove the girl from the scene, though she
knows that she cannot dispose of the lamp. The lamp is the property

of her in-laws' house that w~ given as a marriage gift to her

husband's sister. Also, the traditional lamp is a symbol of prosperity
and wealth, which is why the sister has pawned it to her natal house.

Planning a trick implies overcoming an obstacle. In the story

of the stepdaughter who thrives on cucumber, the stepmother wants to
destroy the cucumber creeper. She pretends to be suffe~ing from
racking headache. When her husband sympathizes with her, she tells
him that the headache would be cured only if she can apply the paste
of the root of that particular cucumber creeper on 'her forehead. Her
husband, believing her, goes in search of the cucumber creeper.

In another story, a king plans to do away with a young officer

in his court because he is enamoured of the young man's wife. After
consulting with his minister the king asks the young man to go on a
mission to get nagarathinam (the precious stone of the snake Jcing)
and not to return empty handed. Since the snake king lives in a palace

X5
deep under the sea surrounded by thousands of snake, the king is sure
that the young man wil-J die on his mission.

In the story with surveillance as its central theme, the girl

cleverly weaves a plan to cheat the king and his minister. On learning
that the son of the servant-maid, who used to wash her clothes, has
fallen in love with her, she invites the young man to the palace and
hides him in a huge box. The king and the minister have been
sleeping by her side to make sure that she is alone. One night she calls
out the youngman after making sure that both the persons lying by
her side are fast asleep. As they are making love, the girl nudges the
minister, who, briefly awakened, is shocked and thinks that the king
is making love to the girl. Likewise she disturbs the king who gets the
impression that the minister is her partner in bed.

In the tale of songs, as we have seen, the unsung songs play a

trick to punish the girl who has not been singing them, by turning into
a pair of slippers at the entrance and as a shirt hanging inside the
. ,
room. We have also seen how the clever woman cheats a man of his
thousand rupees by selling to him a supp~sedly magical pot.

_Tricks may be resorted also to help people. In some tales,

tricks are played by protagonists to fulfil some desire, wish, or
mission. In the tale of the youngman who sees a beautiful girl from
heaven coming to earth with her friends to frolic in a pond, and falls
in love with her. He approaches the old lady for information and
guidance. She tells him that the girl is the daughter of the of heaven,
4

and comes to the earth her friends once in a month. To enter and
leave heaven, she requires the dress that she wore. If one can manage
to keep her dress she would not go back. The young man steals her
dress and returns to his hut. He has been cautioned not to look back

86
on his way to the hut, else he would turn into a salt statue. The girl,
seeing him take her dress away begs him to return it. But he only
gives her a new dress, keeping her heavenly dress inside his thigh. So
the girl has no way but to marry him.

In another tale, a trick is used to punish the villain. In this tale

a king found a magical ring, which took him to a palace under a pond.
Here he found a beautiful princess prisoned by a snake. The king
married the princess and lived there. Another king, seeing the girl,
coveted her. An old woman assisted him, poisoning the king and
capturing the magical ring. The body of the dead king was left in the
palace under the pond along with his magical sword. To bring him
alive with the help of the sword and release the girl from the other
king's prison, the magical ring was needed.

The dead king's minister, seeing the magical ring with the old
woman, played a trick to get it back. He went to her house claiming
that he was her son who had been lost long ago. The old woman was
deliriously happy at finding her lost son and wanted to celebrate his
return in a big way. When preparations for a function were on, the
minister casually asked her for the ring in her hand, which she readily
gave him.

In another tale on old woman used her wiliness to save a girl's

life. The girl was the tenth wife of the snake king. He used to tie the
wedding chain in the morning and kill the bride in the night. The girl,
knowing that her death was near, was afraid. An old woman who saw
her asked the reason for her sadness. When the girl explained the
matter, the old woman told her this trick to save herself. The trick
was to pose a challenge to the snake when it came to kill her. The
snake would accept the challenge. The challenge was to remove the

X7
seven skins of the snake before' she counted to three. When the snake
started casting off its skins, the girl was to spray milk on its body and
beat it with a stick. If she did this quickly, the snake wouid become
human.

xv. The lady convinced her husband of her story. He allowed her
to use the oil-lamp:

The great drama was enacted in this ensemble with

professional perfection, well arranged script, and unerring logic. The
aunt and her servant-maid acted out the drama. The script was
decided in the previous ensemble, the logic was verified, the actors
were decided, and performing time was also fixed. The performance
started when the uncle returned home. The aunt improvised the
dialogue of the play, which she had drawn up in outline earlier,
during the performance. The servant-maid, who played a supporting
role, made it all look realistic.

The aunt referred to an important cultural element, the

soothsayer. He had said that' the only remedy for her unusual
headache was to apply a poultice with hot sand heated by placing the
oil-lamp on sand in the sunlight.

Soothsayers, palmists, astrologers and magicians are important

cultural elements of Tamil society. They have their say in all
problems both for an individual and for society. They operate with a
logic entirely different from what we consider knowledge in the
scientific context. The soothsayer's verdict is accepted as true
knowledge by people. The soothsayers need society of a particular

xx
way of thinking for their existence, and such a society needs them for
their reassuring and omniscient role.

Palmists, astrologers and magicians are 10 Tamil culture

considered as repositories of traditional knowledge about the natural
world and social world. Their service to society ranges from
controlling nature to controlling one's own body. Uncertainties,
ambiguities, and happenings above the sensory level are solved,
explained and rectified only .by these person. They confidently
explain the obscurities associated with human birth, growth, death,
occasional malfunctions in the biological machine, psychological
disequilibrium and changes in fortune with the help of other-worldly
sings such as planets and other heavenly bodies, undeciphered
hieroglyphics on palms, complicated relationships among natural
beings, the powers of the earthly globe, and its continuous physical
and chemical reactions. The complicated realm of similarities and
dissimilarities in actions, happenings and events are brought into a
system that has its own logic. Within this system all these
undeciphered signs are filled with meanings, and their secrets
revealed.

In the common perspective of palmists, astrologers, etc.

disorders in the human body are explained as the doing of evil spirits
both from nature and from dead human beings. In their view,
therefore, it is not possible to treat these diseases without defeating
evil powers. The indigenous medicinal system propitiates good spirits
and pacifies evil spirits. Every object, living and non-living, in
considered as active elements with the capacity to stimulate desired
changes in human beings. Every object has a spirit, which is either

X')
 good or bad. One who has learned how to control these spirits. is
called a magician, soothsayer or their synonyms.

This cultural element is used by the aunt in the nucleus tale to

serve her purpose.. In the story of the stepdaughter thriving on
cucumbers, too, the stepmother tries to destroy tile cucumber creeper
by taking resort to a likely prescription of the indigenous medicinal
system. In the tale of the wooden doll, it becomes the primary agent
of the ensuing narrative conflict of the tale.

XVI. The murderous plan. Bribing of the servants. The execution

of the plan:

The uncle, convinced by his wife's playacting, ordered the

servants to follow his wife's instructions. The servants had already
been bought over by her with bribes. The servants were told that
. when. the lamp became hot in the sun, the girl would come out on
account o(the heat. They were to catch her and kill her and bring her
limbs and eyes to the aunt and drown the rest of the body in a well.
The servants carried out the instructions.

In other folktales, the supposed executioners let go the

intended victims while convincing their superiors that they have
executed the orders. In the story where the dog delivers human
babies, the king, persuaded by the queen and her servant-maid, orders
the dog and the pups delivered by the queen to be killed. But the
soldiers moved to pity, let the dog and the pups run away, reporting
to the king that they have done their assigned task. For evidence they
display their swords soaked in the blood of a squirrel.

')()
 In the demon sister's story,O the prince sentenced to death by
his father is told by the soldiers assigned the task of executing him to
go away from that village. They soak their swords in a goat's blood.

In the story of the demon sisters, the two demon sisters

implicate the queen and the minister's wife, both of them pregnant, as
being demons. They are sentenced to death but the soldiers let them
go free.
The act of bribing, which forms part of the nucleus tale,
involves the briber, the bribed, and the nature of transaction. The
transaction may be monetary, or valuables such as gold, gems, etc., or
in terms of physical help, advice, a solution to a problem etc. The
nature of transaction in a bribe and a reward is very similar, but the
difference between them comes with the realm of ethics. Society's
conception and judgment about an action decide whether it is bribery
or reward. Illegal, harmful, dishonest, immoral actions come in the
domain of bribery, which merits a legal penalty. So the act of bribing
demands the maintenance of secrecy. On the other hand, reward is for
a morally approv'ed act which is carried out openly.

The offer of gold as bribe is popular in folktales. In the tales

where fish, snake, tortoise and squirrel are metamorphosed into
human beings, stepmothers are bribed with bags of gold coins by the
queens, in order to get brides for their sons. In all the tales,
stepmothers came forward to accept the deal.

The striking feature of these tales is the way the transactions

are openly announced, violating the common code of secrecy for the
act of bribing. The stepmothers' function in the story is considered as
villainy but not that of the queens who bribe him, The moral
reasoning of the hearers is constructed by the narrative logic of the

91
tales that the queens' wish to; marry their sons is morally accepted
while the stepmothers' function of accepting the bribe is condemned
as violation of the legal code. thus it seems to be accepted in Tamil
society that a mother can do anything to marry her son, but not her
daughter.

The next major element presented 10 this ensemt>Je IS the

execution of the lamp girl. Mostly, antagonists of the tales are
"

executed. In the story of the de~on sisters, the two demons who lived
in the palace, and their elder :sister who is in the cave house, are
simultaneously executed by the sons of the king and the minister. A
beautiful princess in the cave house tells them the secret about the
demon sister's life. They thus learn that the demon sister's life is in a
crab. They chop up the crab and thus put an end to the demon sisters.

In the story of the headless thief, the son has no way but to cut
off the father's head. Otherwise the entire family would be lynched
by the villagers.

XVn.The servants reported with the limbs and the c;yes. She
ordered these to be placed in different places:

The aunt perhaps feared that the girl inside the lamp would
come alive if the corpse was left intact. So she decided to keep the
parts under the custody. She directed the. servants to place the hands
in the cotton haystack, the legs in the millet haystack, and the eyes in
the paddy bran sack.
Males generally do not participate in collecting, stocking, and
USIng haystack and bran. These are all used as cattle feed and
firewood. Both, cattle breeding and cooking are in the domain of

n
females. It is an oopen secret that women use these stocking places as
their personal safe lockers. By placing the parts of the butchered girl
in cotton and millet haystacks and paddy barn sack, the aunt avoided
the likelihood of her husband or her son finding them. Cotton and
millet hay have an appearance similar to hands and legs. Hands. and
legs hidden in a haystack would not be easily distinguished from the
rest of the hay. The idea of keeping eyes in a bran sack originated
from the practice of keeping eggs in a pot half filled with paddy bran.
In shape and form the human eye may be compared with an' egg.
People with protruding eyes are nicknamed muttak kannan (egg
eyes).

The theme of secreting things away appears in the tale of the

ill-treated daughter-in-law. The girl was married at the age of sixteen.
Her husband was a good-natured young man, which was some
consolation. He worked in the fields the whole day and came house
late in the evening. At home, the mother-in-law did not give proper
food to the daughter-in-Iaw,did not allow her to dress well, did not
/

allow her to be alone with the husband. One day they cooked lamb.
The mother;.in-law reluctantly gave her a single bone. Another time,
when they harvested corn in their field, the mother-in-law gave her
only a single sickly corn cob. the girl kept these two things in the
cotton haystack.

One day, her husband died of snake bite, and the distraught
girl committed suicide. After a week, her spirit possessed an
unmarried girl, and told the whole unhappy story to the villagers. The
shocked villagers asked for evidence of her story. The possessed girl
guided them to the haystack where the bone and the corn cob were

<)3
hidden. From that day the mother-in-law was ostracized In the
village.

Sequence Three

XVID. The body is in the well. The gardener's fears:

The first ensemble of the third sequence concerns the girl in

the well. A gardener used to draw water fromthe well for his flower
garden. The day after the girl was killed, when the gardener drew
water, he heard peculiar sounds emanating from the well. Suspecting
some devilary, he called his wife, who was a flower-woman, to come
and see,

The devilary of ghosts, devils and bad spirits is a common

theme of folktales. One tale goes like this: Two neighbours in a
village decided to draw water from the well for their paddy fields
early next morning. A devil, who overheard them, decided to playa
practical joke on them. Next morning the devil assumed the form of
one of them, and went to call the other. They went to the fields. The
devil drew water while the neighbour worked to regulate the flow of
water. But, the flow of water was enormous and' uncontrolable. He
was soon exhausted and called to his friend to stop the work for a
while. Hearing no reply, he went over to the well and found no one
there except the pair of tired bullocks. When he looked into the well,
it was dry. Only then he realized that the devil had been at war, and
fainted.

In another tale, an evil spirit, who lived alone on a tree, once

tasted the food from a villager's lunch box. The spirit had never

<)4
tasted such delicious food and desired to have it more often. So it
metamorphosed into a young girl, and stood by the villager's paLl} as
he was going home. The villager, when he saw the girl weeping
helplessly, took her to his house as a servant girl. From that day the
spirit had its fill of the tasty food.

The devils' relishing food is also the theme of the tale of two
sisters, where the devils steal food in the dark because the household
never lit a lamp in their house. In the people's day-to-day belief,
spirits may be good or evil. The spirits of people who die an
unnatural death such as through accident, murder or suicide, roam in
world as formless, figureless entities until their allotted life time
comes to an end. Those who die of old age are considered to rest in
ultimate peace. The spirits that help people in fulfilling wishes and
needs are worshipped as deities. Every caste group has its specific
deity. the deity brings prosperity to the village, by bringing about a
good rainfall, by nourishing fields for surplus productivity, by
guarding people from dreadful diseases, and by restoring morality by
\

punishing the wicked.

.
they are propitiated ,in gratitude.

Evil spirits or ghosts and devils reside in trees, parti'cularly in

tamarind and drumstick trees, and are powerful at night. It is believed
that dogs and cows can see them. SpiritS have' no legs. They move
through the air, suspended a foot above the earth.

Black magic, one of the traditional healing systems, deals with

these supernatural beings by controlling and commanding them to
fulfil desires and needs. Black magicians (manthiravathi or kodangi)
are said to have a good number of evil spirits under their control. It is
a popular belief that these magicians hammer a nail on the heads of
these spirits.

1)5
XIX. The lamp girl's request. The flower-woman helps her to
come out:

In this ensemble, for the first time in the narration, a donor

character is introduced. The girl's body in the well asks the tldwer-
(woman and the gardener to lift it up and promises good fortune to
them. They lift the body out of the well and lay it on a cot,and feel
pity for the tortured girl.

Unlike folktales from elsewhere, there are no fairies in Tamil.

Instead there are grand old ladies,· grand old men, sages, and flower-
women who perform functions similar to that of the fairies. In one
tale, the spirit of the dead mother comes as a donor, in a way
substitute for a fairy. Not only in folktales, even in other folk genres
there are no references to fairies.

Flower-woman is a purely cultural construct or a hangover of

a traditional social figure not generally seen in the contemporary
world. Nanthavanam (garden) in fairy tales where the flower-woman
lives, is a land at the periphery of a village. An imaginary land, it
operates as a mediatory plane between domestic space and ~ild space.
Wrongly puhished persons who are driven from the domestic sphere
to these wild spaces, begin to operate from this mediatory space to get
back into the domestic space. The flower-woman who owns this land
unfailingly helps them to demonstrate their virtue.

In the story of the prince and his friend, the prince cheats and
attempts to murder his friend. The later, miraculously escaping the
death trap, reaches the village after a long and tire some journey in
pain and despair, certain that no one would believe his charges
against the prince and his claims over the princesses. So he spins a
plan to contact the princesses whom he wishes to be his supporters for
his claims. But first, he is in d~sperate need for a place to hide from
the eyes of the prince. The flower-woman greets him, hears his tragic
story in compassion, consoles him, wishes him success in his mission,
promIses her support, and allows him to stay there until he gets
justice.

In another tale, the flower-woman comes mysteriously to help

the protagonist. Here, the king's wife is in a grave quandary as the
king has set a deadline for her to give birth to a child, failing which
she would be sent to the work~rs' den. When the queen is weeping
over her plight, the flower-woman arrives mysteriously and helps her.
Later in the same tale, when the daughter-in-law, who was cheated by
her stepmother, is in the Same garden waiting for the snake husband
wro will cause her death, the same flower-woman comes to her aid.

In the story of the prince and his friend an eagle and a fish
also help the friend. Earlier the friend saved the eagle and the fish
from death. So the fish saved him from drowning in the sea and
helped him to reach the shore. The eagle took him to his village on its
back. In the tale of the cucumber eating girl, the dead mother helps
her daughter coming in the form of a woman. For the second time,
she gives her good slippers to wear, three trees to play with, and
shows a cucumber creeper for food. In many tales sages help kings to
get children by giving them magical fruits.

Many of the donors in folktales are invariably active and

philanthropic in nature. They decide as also dictate the course of
action in' critical situations. They resurrect or reinvigorate the heroes,
most of whom would have been destroyed or condemned by the
villains.

<)7
 In the nucleus tale, the girl inside the lamp was killed and
thrown into the well. The narrator of the tale starts referring to the
girl as 'it', signifying a non-human being.

Throughout the story, in fact, the narrator uses differing

subject markers to denote the different life spans of the girl. For every
spatial shift correlated with chronologically arranged time span, the
girl's subjectivity is switched betWeen human and non-human. The
girl was born in her house and within an hour or less, she was put into
an oil-lamp. Metaphorically, the girl child has been transferred from
her mother's womb to the stem of the lamp. Till the time the girl is
noticed by the cousin, she is referred to as 'it': "the queen placed it
inside the lamp, what would the
.
child do? It, used to come out and
take food without anyone noticing." "the girl was so beautiful, she
had hair sixteen feet long." When the girl is killed and thrown into the
well, she again becomes' it' and remains so till she becomes bodily
perfect with the help of the flower-woman. The girl's subjectivity is
not constructed in a linear way' but it swings back and forth, up and
down, here· and there, human to non-human, sexuality to non-
sexuality. Her subject matter is not improvised, enriched, altered but
on the whole the order of her essence is constantly dismantled,
destroyed, collapsed, butchered, tortured andln the process of getting
them organized and rearranged, her subjectivity radically transforms
into another. In the nucleus tale, changes in her subjectivity from' it'
to 'she' or child to girl and then to bride as well as wife look like a
continuous, linear series of actions. But the narration of the tale
illuminates the discontinuities between these actions; that is, the
actions that take place between the birth of the child and its placement

<)x
inside the lamp; and the whole sequence of actions between the girl's
butchering and her fe-attainment of living human form.

The girl's eyeless, limbless body is mentioned as mundam in

the narration. Mundam normally refers to a headless body. Mundam
also signifies naked, untraceable, unidentified, In the tale, the aunt's
motivation is not only to kill the girl but also to erase her identity. In
the tale of the headless thief also the motive is to erase the identity of
a person.

xx. The girl made their garden beautiful and advised them to
sell the flowers to tile palace:

Flowers symbolize prosperity, wea!th and progress, and are

found in the equivalent of these desiderata in a wide range of natural
and cultural objects from heavenly bodies to human beings. People
offer flowers to gods and goddesses saying while prayers and as part
of rituals, and consider these flowers as sacred objects that have
attained magical powers by being offered to heavenly beings.

.Flower is a powerful metaphor signifying females. Girls are

named after flowers (malligai, mullai, roja, kanagam, lily, etc.). The
act of the bee sucking nectar from flowers is compared to a love affair
between a male (the bee) and a female (the flower). The Tamil word
for puberty ceremony is puppu chadanku translated as the ritual of
blossoming.

Women bedeck their hair with flowers, which signifies marital

felicity. Widows may not do so. Wearing colourful clothes, having
kunkumam on the forehead, wearing bangles and other ornaments,
and decorating the hair with beautiful flowers, especially flowers with
pleasant fragrance, are a series of symbols that provide conceptual

')t)
 cultural meanIng of female. The female body is never entirely
biological, it IS always over shadowed, decorated, shrouded,
fabricated and filled with artifacts that are pregnant with cultural
values. The transaction of these cultural artefacts between persons is
also strictly monitored and restricted, in the sense that the act of
presenting flowers or kunkumam or clothes by a male to a female
involves multiple meanings. A father or a husband may present these
artefacts to a female, because giving and accepting flowers or
kunkumam expresses love between these socially approved confines.

Gadands are used in welcoming people, honouring them on

special occasions and for venerating deities during rituals. Normally
rose garlands are used for public ceremonies, and jasmine garlands
for rituals. In garlanding also, a taboo operates in that a male may not
garland a female--unless they have a martial relationship ..

In the marriage ceremony, after the thali (wedding thread) is

tied around the bride's neck, the couple are asked to garland one
. another. The act of garlanding is the culmination of the wedding
ceremony. The two garlands are kept safe in the bride's house for
three days and on the fourth day thrown in a river or a pond or a well.
The marriage f\lnction is popularly called malai marttlthal,
transferring the garlands.

The mention of flowers brings us to the phenomenon of

poonagam, a poisonous snake that reside inside flowers. Except for
the fact that these poonagams, which are very small and almost
invisible to the human eye live inside flowers, do not have other
details. It is commonly believed that cobras live in Ihalamhoo
(screwpine flower), and all snakes are attracted to the fragrance of
flowers. A particular tale, which is quite different from the rest in

100
narrative pattern, since it has a tragic end, tells about the love affair
between a high caste male and a low caste female. The tale begins
with their love, and elaborates the contestation between their families
and then comes to an e~d with the tragic death of the bride bitten by a
poonagam which was in the garland put on he~ by the bridegroom.

In another folktale, a poonagam that mysteriously entered the

nostril of a princess, stayed there and killed her bridegrooms on the
wedding night. No one was forthcoming to marry her. Finally, a
young man accepted to marry the princess. An old man had advised
him not to sleep on his first night but to keep vigil. Late in the night,
the poonagam came out of the princess's nose and tried to bite him.
The young man cut the poonagam into pieces with his sword and thus
freed the princess of her curse.

Flowers also facilitate conception, as In the tale of the

childless queen, who is given two flowers by a flower-man, eats both
and gives birth to a snake and a boy.

In another tale flowers are used as a device to decide the

winner in a dance competition held in heaven. A man wh~ went to
heaven in search of a wife, found a princess. The king wanted to test
his intelligence, so he asked him to decide who was the better court.
dancer of heaven, Urvasior Rambai. The man gave jasmine garlands
tied as a ball to each dancer and asked them to dance while holding
the flower balls in their hands. Mter the dance, he got back the flower
balls and declared Urvasi to be the winner whose garland was fresh.
Later he explained the king that whoever could handle even a flower
ball gently, not damaging its freshness while dancing, would be a
good dancer.

101
 T~e next major element introduced in this ensemble is th~
palace. Even though the tale was started with a king, his house wa5
not mentioned as a palace. Neither was the uncle's house mentioned
as a palace when the lamp girl's mother came there with the lamp.
But in this ensemble the house is referred to as a palace. It may be
noted that the word palace is used in the context where the concept of
garden is also active. The relationship between the garden on the
outskirts of the village and palace inside the village was explained in
the previous ensemble.

No single tale explains the features of a palace in detail or the

nature of the persons living there. Apparently, a palace is a place
where the king and his family live. All the king's wives may live
there, or sometimes the king may arrange a separate palace for his
new wife. The king marries as many girls as he likes if the earlier
wives have not given him children. The barren wives are normally
sent to work as servant-maids. The servants reside in the palace. Their
job is to cook food and feed the cattle. Minister rarely live in the
palace. The palace has two or three storeys. Cattle and other animals
live in separate sheds. The washer-women from the village.
Flower-woman also have easy access to the palace. Expectedly, a
palace would look like a normal village house with cattle everywhere,
bran sacks in one corner, millet haystack in another, etc.

XXI. Aunt's reaction to the flowers. Flower-woman's reply.

Cousin's marriage:

The matter of the cousin's marriage formally broached in this

ensemble. Even though the narrator, when she introduced the cousin

102
 in the tale, said that he had become a young man and had to get
married this is the first time his marriage is discussed by the fictional
characters in this ensemble.

Marriage is a collective work, social event, where people who

engage jn different professions voluntarily come forward to converge
at a single point, marriage. It is not just a family affair, bot a mass
event, a festival, and an informal way of coming together. It becomes
a meeting place for kith and kin of a single community, who live in
different places, to share their feelings, both cheerful and bad, to
revive their bonds with others, to communicate major happenings,
and even to propose for other marriage alliances.

Not only fot marriages but for all life cycle ceremonies such
as birth ceremony, puberty, marriage and death, people gather at the
house concerned to participate. Non-participation is taken as a major
offence. The householder must invite all relatives and friends in
person ~ith due respects. The uncle of the bride or groom should be
the first to be invited. When inviting them the father of the groom or
. bride should go with a tray (thamboolam) loaded with betel leaves,
betel nuts, and perhaps a new set of dhoti and shirt. He should offer
the tray formally and also convey the invitation. If there is a printed
invitation card, it should be placed in the tray pasted with turmeric
powder on all four corners indicating sacredness.

The central conflict of the tale was not between the girl and
the aunt but from the aunt's fear that it was trap to undermine her
power position in the house. She thought that the girl had been
smuggled inside the house to marry her uncle. If the problem was of a
simple misunderstanding it could have been solved by having a
mediator or even by themselves through making clarifications. But

103
the problem was not regarding the groom but with birth of the girl.
She was not from the aunt's natal house, and thus not a biood
relation. So the conflict became of blood relations vis-a-vis affinal
relations, natal house and in-law's house.

XXII.The girl's ploy to get back her limbs and eyes. How she
became whole:

Unlike other ensembles, a series of cultural elements are

introduced and also a chain of actions is performed in this ensemble.
The girl's limbs and eyes are hidden in the palace under the watchful
eyes of the aunt. Only a person who has easy access to the palace
would have some chance of retrieving them. So the girl asks the
flower-woman to do it.

Agriculture in Tamil Nadu is of two kinds, wet cultivation

(nanjQl) and dry cultivation (punjai). The major crops in wet
cultivatiQll are paddy, sugarcane, plantain, etc. This is practised
mainly in river valleys as these crops need continuous flow, of water.
In dry cultivation, crops like millet, cotton, chilli, etc, are prevalent.

The haystack is a major element in Tamil Nadu. Hay has

multiple uses. The haystack is a deciding criterion of a person's
wealth. Paddy hay, millet hay, cotton hay, and sesame hay are used
both as feeds for cattle and as fuel.

As economic importance and functional use of haystack are

increased and as they become a symbol of wealth, the haystack turns
as an object of desire. It is a problem to keep them safe from damages
both from humans and insects. To avoid both kind of damages the

104
building of haystack becomes a technical job. As paddy cultivation
becomes a major crop in all over Tamil Nadu people get huge amount
of paddy hay and as it is impossible to' construct the stack inside
houses, they store them in village common places as separate piles.
As haystacks become a symbol of wealth and inevitable feed for
cattle, they become targets during disputes.

The transaction that is taken place in this ensemble, gives

important clues regarding the perceptions of human anatomy. The girl
advised the flower-woman in all three times to tell different reasons
in order to search the captivated parts. Three undeciphered
configurations of signs are presented in this ensemble which have its
meaning within conceptual system. In the first series of signs we have
cotton hay, legs and firewood; like wise in the second, millet hay,
hands, and feed for the cattle; and in third, bran, eyes, and feed for
the calf.

The flower-woman first approaches the aunt with a day-to-day

problem of people in villages in order to be able to search the cotton
haystack. The stoves mostly depend on firewood, cow dung cakes,
• 0

and paddy bran. C()llecting firewood from the forests is an essential

activity. In many tales it is mentioned as a major cultural trait.

The tale where a childless couple agree that the wife should
stay with the wood cutter in the forest for a month in order to
conceive is one such. In another tale, a' poor family of five married
brothers and the mother, who lost her husband long back, one day go
to the forest to collect firewood'. When they are all absorbed in
collecting wood, the edge of the mother's saree is caught in a throne
bush. Feeling the tug, the mother unconsciously reacts as if someone

lOS
lovable to her has tugged at her saree and utters an amor<?us reply.
The sons, realizing her longing, decide to marry her off.

Making fire and preserving it are perceived as a household

necessity. The prosperity and wealth of a family judged by the nature
of the cooking stove. Jt is commonly said _that the fire in the stove in
rich households never went off as cooking was carried on
continuously. Before match boxes canle on thescene, people used to
keep the fire alive all day and night. It was common to borrow fire
from such houses. In one tale, ~e mother asked her daughter to get
fire from the house of her brother who was rich and lived separately
in the same village. The girl went there with a coconut shell to bring
fire. While returning, because of a hole at the bottom of the shell, her
palm was burned. She ~ransferredthe shell to the other hand and
reached home, all the while moistenillg the burn with saliva. The
mother thought the daughter had begged for something from her
brother's house and drew the girl out of the house.

The reasons that the flower-woman tells the aunt and iater to
the uncle, have all to do with .feeding her calf. An agri-cuI tural
community like that in Tamil Nadu easily takes to livestock breeding.
Almost everyone in a village would like to have cattle in their houses.
In most place cattle sheds are attached to the house where cows,
bullocks and buffaloes stay. Goats are herded in village commons or
on roads. Bullocks have special value, as handy agricultural help. One
untouchable community in Tamil Nadu is called the Devendra Kula
Vel alar has a taboo about eating· beef. They consider bullocks as
sacred beings as they are used for agriculture.

Folktales bespeak the cultural importance associated with.

cattle and the wealth they bring. One of them is about a buttermilk

(()(,
seller. She had a cow. One day, while carrying the buttermilk on her
head, she started daydreaming: from the following day she would
save enough money so she could buy two more cows; and would
appoint few persons to assist her in the expanded business. Soon she
would become rich. Then she would appoint few persons to assist her.
I

Consequently, number of cows would increase and she would be&me

rich having good amount of money and jewels. Then everyone would
come and ask for help but she would not help them because no one
helped her when she was in trouble. She would simply tell them to go
away. As she gesticulated the· pot of buttermilk on her head lost
balance and broke.

In another tale, a husband and wife daydream together while

eating, after the husband wishfully remarks that they had a cow. It
ends up with his beating her because she would give some buttermilk
to her brother's children whereas he would have none of it. The
people's aspiration to own wealth is also the theme of the story where
a wily woman defends the gullible man of a thousand rupees meant
for buying a cow, and the tale where the mother asks the son to buy a
cow with three hundred rupees.

Households also have to be on guard against cattle thieves.

Once a man's bullock was stolen form his house. Thereafter he
regularly visited the weekly market expecting the thief to bring it
there for sale. One day his bullock was brought to the market. The
owner recognized his bullock and brought the case before the village
heads. The thief insisted that it was his bullock. So the owner covered
the bullock's eyes with his hands and asked him to identify the
diseased eye. The thief was at a loss because he did not know.

107
 In another tale, four thieves took a pair of bullocks from a
berry which lived with an old couple, giving them household help.
The berry had taken the bullocks to plough the field, though the
. couple had cautioned about thieves. The thieves, when they found the
berry ploughing w.ith two bullocks, nonchalantly drew the bullockS;to
their cave. Later, the berry made acquaintance of a stone, a stick, a
,
scorpion, and a snake, went with them to the thieves cave and
brought back all the articles the '·thieves had stolen· including the
bullocks.

In folktales, the distinction between wile and cheating is

capricious. Apparently, there is nothing good or bad intrinsically but
the circumstances and the motive make it so.· Linguistically,
thanthiram (wile) is distinguished from choolchi (cheating). The one
is positively connoted, the other is loaded with harm. One who resorts
to thanthiram has the right to desire the intended object, but not the
one who resorts to choo/chi. Thanthiram is acceptable within the
cultural legal system. It is harmless and is not considered as violation
of individual rights. Contrarily, the actions of a person who has no
right to desire that object are chao/chi, a covert act, a violent intrusion
into other's privacy, and a violation of cultural codes.
What the hero does is thanthiram while the villain's action is
chao/chi. In the nucleus tale, the girl's tricks to get back her
dismembered parts are thant/liram. Taking them back without the
aunt's knowledge is not violation of law. Likewise in the tale where
the minister resorted to dissimulation to get back the magic ring in
order to bring the king back to life is thanthiram. The trick played by
the owner of the cow to get back his bullock from the thief is also

lOll
 thanthiram. In the snake king story, the fish king story, the tortoise
king story also the wives resort. to thanthiram.

The next major element introduced in this ensemble is:' th.e

miraculous: it is believable only in the context of the tale world .
. Thus, as soon as the flower-woman handed the body parts to the girl,
she became whole. She did not require magical instruments or spells
to perform the task. The absence of any magical assistance to the
protagonists of the tale might commonly be considered as a flaw in
the narration. Nevertheless, my observation while this tale was being
. narrated to a group of hearers. may be noted: there was no reaction
whatever against this discontinuity. During the last part of the tale one
listener, a middle-aged woman, referred to this girl as a supernatural
being who was born with the blessings of goddess Parvathi. The
story-teller did not react to this comment, but let it pass.

The act of restoration is the central theme of another tale. In

this tale, the minister heard two birds talking about the fate, of the
king. They were saying that a snake would come and bite the :king in
the ninth month of his wife's first pregnancy. The minister de~ided to
;

save the king but the birds told him that if he disclosed this ~ews to
anyone, his head would split· into pieces. On :that fateful day
,
the
.

minister sneaked into the king's bedroom and killed the snake. But'
. I

the king doubted his loyalty and thought that he had tried to kill him.
and ordered the minister's beheading. When this was done, the
minister's head narrated the whole sequence of events to the king.
The repentant king noW wanted to get his friend back alive. The
.
minister's head told him that if the king sacrificed his infant at the
Kali temple the minister would be restored to life. Accordingly, the

\09
king sacrificed his son to Kali. Immediately the minister's body an(
head were joined together, and the infant also came back to life.

Sequence Four:

xxm. The wedding proposal for the cousin. The engagement:

In a folktale a marriage may be arranged dramatically. In one
tale, a king in a village wanted to marry of his daughter who was so
beautiful and kind. He sent a group of messengers with a portrait of
the princess to other countries to find a suitable groom for the girl.
Meanwhile there was another group on a similar mission from
another kingdom in search of a bride for their prince. One day by
chance the groups met on the bank of a river. After formal greetings
and introductions they realized that they were actually searching for
one another.. The groups exchanged their portraits and fixed the date
ofmarriage.

In the stories of the fish king, the snake king, the tortoise king,
and the squirrel king the brides were chosen in a similar manner.
Since nobody was coming forward to give their daughter to the
princes, and inducement of a bag full of gold coins was offered,
which induced stepmothers to offer their stepdaughters. In the snake
king story, the king decided to marry off the other prince first, but the
snake threatened the king's messengers and told them to convey to
the king to respect its rights as the elder brother.

In another story, the obstacles to the marriage of a lover

couple are illustrated elaborately. The girl's mother wanted to marry
her to her brother's son; the father wanted to marry her to his sister's

110
son . .In the young man's case the mother had promised her son to her
brother's daughter. The girl was placed incommunicado and her
parents decided to marry her off quickly. One day the young'man
passed a message to the girl through her friend to elope with him. But
the girl just could not go out. So the friend took her out by hiding her
in a tomato basket.

In the story of the girl inside the wooden doll she had the
unconditional support of her uncle who knew the truth about her,
though the cousin was opposed to marrying the wooden doll.

XXIV. The girl killed the bride:

This particular ensemble introduces new cultural elements and

inferences. It also illustrates the grey line between two capricious
concepts of villainy and heroic acts. Aimless killing is never
considered as a characteristic of a hero, but in the tale of the girl
inside the wooden doll who resorted to such killing society has no
expression of disapproval. The victims were neither protagonists nor
antagonists, and were· in no way connected with her fate. But the
heroine of the tale without any qualms put these trusting, unarmed
girls to death. They merely had the misfortune to cross her path.
When the cousin married the first girl, the girl in the doll started her
course of action on the first day of the marriage by prescribing a
treacherous, cruel recipe for beautiful, long hair. The naive bride
followed the prescription and died. In the case of the second girl, the
girl in the wooden doll carried out her killing after the marriage. The
womenfolk were in the kitchen cooking for the guests. Coconut oil
was being boiled in a big vessel. The doll girl came and dipped her

III
 hand the boiling vessel as if testing the temperatUre. Since her hand
was covered with wood, the boiling oil did not harm her. Then she
asked .the bride to test the oil with her hand. The bride unthinkingly
dipped her hand into the vessel and got burnt. She became bedridden
and died within few days.

Folktales make fun of the ingenuous and ignorant. In one tale,

a fun-loving black magician created a comical situation for a family.
~he eldest son of the family was unwell and the father sought the
magician's intervention. The. latter prescribed a series of ritual
practices, and told them to change the names of everyone and
everything in the house. The sick son became well soon after and the
family maintained the change in names. So the father became banana,
mother became salad, bullock became guest, etc. When the
son-in-law came to visit them after along time, the elder son greeted
him and told him to go inside as salad was inside. He went in to taste
the salad. There was no salad but the mother-in-law welcomed him
and told him that banana would return shortly and he could eat with
banana. He thought that they had prepared a special dish for him .
. When the father returned he told his son to tie the guest. The
son-in-law did not know why his father-in-law wanted him tied up.
The son shouted from the bullock shed to bring a stick (rope) to tie
the bullock. The son-in-law, now utterly bewildered, took to his
heels.

The girl in the nucleus tale (the girl inside the oil.;lamp) went
to the bride's house as a buttermilk seller. Buttermilk seller is a
cultural element. Buttermilk sellers are a common scene in villages
and small towns. They make regular rounds. People pay them at the
end of the month. For each cup sold the buttermilk seller draws a

112
small coloured line on'the wall. The coloured stripes are calculated at
the end of the month and whitewasned for a new series of stripes.

The girl hypnotized the bride with her long hair. Black,long
hair is considered beautiful and done up in many ways.

xxv. The lamp girl met the cousin as a doctor. The talk about
the marriage:

For the first time the lamp girl meets her cousin. He had seen
her once when she came out of the lamp. Now she goes there as a
doctor to treat the high fever-he is suffering from.

In folktales disease operates as a major component. It makes

dramatis personae suffer indiscriminately and drives them across the
country -in search of remedies, treatment and medication. Remedial
measures may be taken at three levels. The first is folk medicine, with
the use of medicinal herbs and magical practices. In a more persistent
disease they may try the indigenous Tamil way of healing, Siddha
medicine. It is a kind of therapy which treats the manifested
symptoms as symptoms of malfunction in the body mechanism and
tries to locate its root by deciphering manifested signs of the disease.
The medicines prescribed may be prepared from botanical as also
chemical components. Black magicians are the third resort. In their
perception illness is caused by evil spirits. Allopathy has made some
inroads as a popular medicine but only as the fourth resort.

In one tale, a king was troubled by an enormous boil on his

back which showed no sign of abatement. The pain made his life a
virtual hell. He could not eat, he could not sleep, and he could not

113
work. One day a Siddha practitioner took a look at his boil and
prescribed the application of the paste of mature pearls. The king had
lost all hope of cure, still he asked the soldiers to bring mature pearls
wherever they could get them. There was in one village a poor
couple. One day the man caught two fishes and brought them home.
When his wife tried to cut them~ the fishes begged her to spare their
life. In return they promised her two mature pearls. So the couple set
the fish free, and the fishes spat two pearls from their stomach. These
pearls had been with them because they did not know where to seU
them. When the news about the king's boil and the prescribed remedy
reached the couple the husband went to the palace and gave the pearls
to the king. The king's boil was cured with their application. In
gratitude he rewarded the man with all facilities that he required to
live comfortably.

In the tale that of the eldest sick son, the black magician told
the family that it was because of an evil spirit living in the house. As
a remedy he asked for a hen, a bag of rice, and a hundred mpees in
cash. As part of the ritual of driving away the spirit he sacrificed the
hen. Immediately, the sick man showed signs of improvement.

The attraction of black magic as a healing system, is in its

quick results. It may sound odd, mystic, black, but the magical cure
brings it popular acclaim. Contrarily, Siddha medicine prescribes a'
strict diet regimen, with salt, oil, spices, specific vegetables, etc.
forbidden. It may take a month or even years to cure the diseased
body system. People who have no patience for this lightly treatment,
look for immediate cure. They prefer black magic, and currently
allopathic treatment.
,

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 It is well said in the nucleus tale that the girl cured the cousin
immediately with a single injection. The scientific basis of allopathic
treatment is far removed from the popular perception of it, which sees
the act of giving an injection as nothing but a magical gesture on par
with the local magicians"mumbo-jumbo to drive out the evil spirit. In
the second sequence of the nucleus tale, the aunt planned to destroy
the lamp with a plausible story that a black magician had told her that
her headache would be cured only when she put an injection with the
money they got from selling the lamp. The secret of the cure is not in
the medicine in the syringe, the magical powers of the person
administering it, etc.

The lamp girl visits the cousin as a doctor in order to Inarry

him. As in other folktales, it is an occasion to acquaintance;' it is also
an occasion to propose marriage. The cousin is inactive and totally
under the control of his mother. The war is between the girl and the
aunt where the uncle and his son have no ground. It is a fight for the
power of the domestic sphere, which is populated by females.

There are stories about persons who had kinship rights to

j

marry but family disputes becomes an obstacle to marriage and about

the way they overcame these barriers. One tale, the lovers were
separated when the girl's family moved to another village after a
dispute with the boy's family. The lovers were also forbidden to
meet. The case was brought to the village head. The court wanted to
know if families were first pacified. The families were first pacified.
Then the court wanted to know if the boy and the girl were really in
love. A date was set, on which the lovers were to come and tell the
secret marks on the other's body. The lovers met secretly and

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revealed their secret marks to each other. On judgement day, they
proved their love before the village court.

In another story, the girl's family went to a distant village

after a dispute. No one knew where they had gone. The pining boy·
used to sing the songs that they both sang together. The girl also did
the same. A traveller heard the boy singing and told him that he had
heard the same song in such and such a village. Immediately the boy
went to that village and brought the girl back as his wife.

XXVI. The cousin visits the girl:

For the first time in the narration the cousin is designated as

the king's son and bridegroom. The ensemble commences with a
reference to him as the king's son but ends with a note about his
return to the house, where he is mentioned as the bridegroom.

The narrator asks the hearers what would be the proper, dress
for a king's son when he goes to meet his fiancee. In no tale is there
talk about the dressing pattern of kings, the dress element being left to
the imagination of the hearers. The popular images about kings and
their surroundings are invariably a creation of film medium, which
follows a pattern in constructing the period of kingdoms and empires,
and romanticizes these feudal setti~gs· to the extent of creating a
nostalgia, such as the periods of golden ages, where everything was
measured and judged in gold, silver and, gens; where people led a
peaceful, luxurious, highly value-based life; where truth was'
cherished, and justice practised; where harmony was maintained
between nature and culture; where women were chaste; and where
hunger was unknown. Such Images of the past are a creation of

I Hi
unfulfiUed wishes of the present, a criticism of unsatisfied and
incapable human minds over contemporary society. It operates
indirectly, rather than introduce discursive elements into the existing
social system.

In a tropical place like Tamil Nadu where the climate is hot

almost round the year, the purpose of dressing becomes less a means
guarding the body from' climatic changes and much more
emphatically a cultural pattern of covering the body. In the villages
the males wear a white plain cloth called vetti, which is tied at the
waist to cover the lower half of the body. The upper portion may be
covered or uncovered, depending on one's caste standing. The item
used for the purpose is a piece of cloth called thundu. Not everyone is
to wear it. People of the upper strata of society use the thundll as a
turban, known as mUlldasu. The people one grade lower can hang It
from the neck; it is then called neri/a. People lower down are
forbidden to wear the Ihulldu in front of their social superiors. When
they are in this angus presence, they are obliged to hold thethundu in
one hand or tie it around their waist to show their subordination.

.
Ordinarily vetti and thundu are of cotton. On special occasions, those
who can afford it, may go for silk fabric with golden holders in
stripes. The dress for a prince while meeting his finance would be silk
vet/i, silk shirt and silk munda.\7J.

The cousin saw the girl sifting rice. Her answers to his queries
are dismissive. She refuses to say who she is, and from where she has
come. Instead she tells him that they are from an other village, came
here for no particular reason, and adds for good measure that they
would not be there for another day.

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 Sifting rice communicates a senes of messages to cousin,
which are not made explicit in the narration. A woman is part of the
family system, contributing to its harmonious functioning, and
helping in the maintenance of the household. She mirrors the
household and is answerable for the fortune or misfortune of the
family. Matters such as cooking, management of family property, and
domestic problem are her domain. Hence it is believed that the
prosperity of a household depends upon the nature of a woman's
hand. It is said that a woman's hand has colour, smell, luck, fortune,
etc. It goodness envelops the family fortunes. The food has aroma and
taste because of the cook's hand. The fragrance of the house is from
her hands. The prosperity comes from her hands.

XXVII. How the marriage was arranged and the marriage

ceremony:

In the normal course, marriages are arranged by the elders.

especially by the father. But in many folktales, the absence of elders
in the family or their antagonistic views necessary forthe youngsters
to take the initiative. In almost all tales the proposal for marriage
comes to a girl from a king, a minister, a rich man, or a brave young
man. They came with the proposal after knowing of her fateful past.

In one story, a dog abducted two sisters from a village in

revenge against a king. The sisters, unaware of this fact, believed that
the dog was their mother. One day a prince and his friend came to the
forest hunt. They had gone very deep into the forest so they decided
to spend the night there. When they were looking for water,
accidentally they met the sisters. As both were beautiful, the prince

IIH
and the friend desired to marry them. The sisters reciprocated their
love, but were afraid of the mother dog. So the next morning the
prinoe and his friend took the sisters to their village secretly and
married them. Similarly a king married a girl whom he found with
her brother, weeping under a tree in the forest. They had been driven
from the house by their stepmother.

Marriage is also a reward for bravery. In the tortoise king

story, the tortoise king got his bride as a reward for his bravery. The
prince and his friend participated in three competitions in three
kingdoms and married the princesses after winning the competitions.

In some tales, the princess herself announces the challenge. In

one tale a princess announced that she wopld marry the man who
come to the palace with thirty-five legs. Ap60r man then went to the
palace in a bullock cart and asked to marry the princess. He had
indeed come to the palace with thirty-five legs, he said. The two
bullocks of the cart had eight legs, the two wheels had twenty-four
spokes (a spoke is called a leg in. Tamil), and the bullocks were
connected by a yoke (also called a leg), thus thirty-three legs in all.
Adding his own two legs, the number came to thirty-five. legs. He
won the competition.

In some ta.les, getting married becOmes a problem because of

family feuds. In one tale, the elder brother did not want the younger
brother to marry in order to grab his share of property. If the younger
brother married it would become impossible to refuse his share. The
younger brother one day asked his elder brother whether he was
going to make arrangements for. Brother answered that it was not
right to rush into a marriage; if at all he wanted to quench his lust he

11<)
could do it with his sister-in-law. The younger brother was ashamed
at this reply and decided to get married on his own.

xxvnI. Reward and punishment:

Rewards and punishments make up the final part of tales.
They provide the conclusion to the central conflicts. Both
protagonists and antagonists get their due deserts. The dramatis
personae may themselves undergo a change, their power positions
within society are changed, new kinship relations are established, the
established may be disrupted, and the stream of life is once again
brought back to order.

In the nucleus tale, the lamp girl becomes the wife; and the
cousin her husband. The girl's father and mother are called back into
the regular system of life with their solitary itinerary brought to an
end, the aunt is punished and sent as a servant, and the lamp that
saved the girl becomes an object of worship.

Punishment may be through displacement, corporeal or

capital. Displacement may be by driving away from home or by
banishment. In a number of tales stepchildren are driven 'out from
home by their stepmother just because the stepdaughter gave a cup of
rice t6 her brother. Inane tale, an elder sister is driven out by her
parents. A prince was banished by the king when his real face was
exposed. A little boy was thrown out of the house when he expressed
his desire of living in a palace with four princesses.

Corporeal punishment may be by demotion to the level of a

servant or by beating. In one tale the aunt is made a servant, feeding
cattle. The king whose nine wives failed to conceive also meted out a
similar punishment to them. Beating is administered to the four

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thieves, who have stolen bullocks from the berry, by a stick, a stone, a
snake and a scorpion. A beggar is beaten by a potter when he breaks
the newly made posts. A sister is punished by a donkey for her
cruelty.

Capital punishment is given to a prince of a village by his

father. In another tale the king and his minister sentenced their own
wives to death. In one tale, where the stepmother substitutes the
stepdaughter with her own daughter as the queen, the king discovers
the treachery and decides to search for his wife. When she is found,
he pronounces the stepdaughter's sentence. She is buried by a pond
up to her neck and the people are ordered to wipe their bottom after
defecation on her shaven head. When one day the stepmother visits
the village and finds her daughter in this disgrace, she takes her out
and, half mad with grief, starts washing her head in the pond like a
stained cloth, smashing it on a stone. The daughter dies
instantaneous Iy.

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