belongs also the Persian work entitled Bakhtyár Náma, in which a stranger youth becomes the king’s favourite and is raised to a position of great honour and dignity, which excites the envy of the king’s Ten Vazírs, who cause him to be accused of violating the royal haram, and the young man is reprieved from day to day through his relating eloquently stories showing the lamentable consequences of precipitation, and he is ultimately found to be guiltless, and, moreover, to be the king’s own son, whom he and his queen had abandoned in a desert when newly born, as they were flying for their lives.—Another group of tales pertaining to the same cycle is found in the Breslau printed Arabic text of the Alf Layla wa Layla (Thousand and One Nights), under the title of “King Shah Bakht and his Vazír Er-Rahwan,” where the king is induced by the machinations of some of his courtiers to believe that his favourite minister Er-Rahwan should slay him within twenty-eight days; and the Vazír, being condemned to death, obtains a respite by relating to the king each night an interesting story until the supposed fatal period is past, when the king is convinced of his fidelity.[5]
Neither the name of the author nor the date of the Alakésa Kathá is known, but it is supposed to have been written in the 16th century. It is one of the very few Asiatic collections in which the tales are all unobjectionable, and while these are found in much older Indian story-books, they present some curious variations, and are moreover of considerable interest as illustrating Hindú popular beliefs and superstitions.
As European mediæval writers were in the habit of piously prefixing the sign of the cross to their compositions, and Muhammedan authors invariably begin their books with the formula, “In the Name of God, the most Merciful, the most Compassionate,” so Hindú writers always commence by invoking the assistance of Ganesa, the god of wisdom. Accordingly the Alakésa Kathá opens thus: “Before relating in Tamil the story of the Four Ministers, which is admired by the whole world, O Mind! adore and serve him who is the elder of the trident-armed and the remover of obstacles”—that is, Ganesa, who is said to be the son of Siva and his spouse Parvati, or of the latter only. Ganesa is represented as having the head of an elephant, which was perhaps originally a symbol of his sagacity, but is accounted for in one of the later legends regarding this deity as follows: The goddess Parvati wished to take a bath one day in her mansion, Kailasa, during the absence of her lord, Siva. Her female attendants were engaged in some domestic duties, but she must have her bath, and there must be a servant to guard the door. So Parvati rubbed her body with her hands, and of the scurf created a man, whom she ordered to watch outside the door, and allow no one to enter. It so happened that Siva returned before his spouse had finished bathing, and he was opposed by the newly-formed man, whose head he immediately struck off, and then he entered the bath-room. This intrusion Parvati regarded as a very great insult, and when she learned that her guard at the door was slain her rage knew no bounds. She demanded that her first son, as she termed him, should be restored to life, and Siva, vexed at his rashness, told his ganas (armies of dwarfs: troops of celestials) to search for him who slept with his head to the north, to kill him, and place his head on the neck of the murdered guard. The ganas, after wandering long and far, found only an elephant asleep in that position, so they brought his head and fixed it on the neck of the man whom Siva had slain, when, lo! he at once rose up alive, a man in body, with the head of an elephant. Siva then appointed him lord of his ganas (Ganesa) and adopted him as his son.—This curious legend is the cause of all Hindús never sleeping with their heads to the north. Ganesa is said to have written down the Mahábhárata from the dictation of Vyasa, the reputed author of that epic. He is represented with four hands, in one of which he holds a shell, in another a discus, in the third a trident, or club, and in the fourth a water-lily.[6]
IV—The Rose of Bakáwalí was originally written, in the Persian language, by Shaykh Izzat Ulláh, of Bengal, in the year of the Hijra 1124, or A.D. 1712. It was translated into Urdú in the beginning of the present century, by Nihál Chand, a native of Delhi, but, from his residence in Lahore, surnamed Lahorí. He entitled his version of the romance Mazhab-i ’Ishk, which signifies the Doctrine of Love; but when the Urdú text was first printed, under the care of Dr. Gilchrist, at Calcutta, in 1804, it bore the original Persian title, Gul-i Bakáwalí; the second edition, published in 1814, by T. Roebuck, bears the Urdú title.
M. Garcin de Tassy published an abridgment (in French) of the Urdú version of the Rose of Bakáwalí in the Journal Asiatique, vol. xvi, 1835, omitting the snatches of verse with which the author has liberally garnished his narrative.[7] A complete English translation, with the verses done into prose, by Lieut. R. P. Anderson, was published at Delhi in 1851, and the Urdú version was again rendered into English, with the poetry done into tolerably fair verse, by Thomas Philip Manuel, and published at Calcutta in 1859. For the version in the present work I have used both G. de Tassy’s French abridgment and Manuel’s English translation, following the former when the narrative seemed to be rather prolix, and the latter when I found the French savant too brief in specially interesting episodes, thus, I trust, making a readable version of this charming romance.
In the Appendix will be found copious parallels, analogues, and illustrations of the chief incidents in the Rose of Bakáwalí, which therefore calls for only a few general remarks in this place. It cannot be said that there is much originality in the romance, most of the incidents being common to the folk-tales of the several countries of India, but they are here woven together with considerable ingenuity, and the interest of the narrative never flags. It may in fact be regarded as a typical Asiatic Tale, in which is embodied much of the folk-lore of the East. Like all fairy tales, it has no particular “moral,” for the hero achieves all his wonderful enterprises with the aid of super-human beings and by means of magical fruits, etc. The various and strange transformations which he undergoes in the course of his adventures are still believed to be quite possible by Muslims and Hindús alike. We very frequently read in Eastern tales of fountains the waters of which have the property of changing a man who drinks of them or bathes in them into a woman, and of transforming a monkey into a man, and vice versa. But this romance is, I think, singular in representing the hero, after having been changed into a young woman, as actually becoming a mother! In the account of his transformation to an Abyssinian, and beset by a shrewish wife and a pack of clamorous children, there is not a little humour. The magical things which he obtains through overhearing the conversation of birds are familiar to the folk-tales of Europe as well as to those of Asia, and I have treated of them fully in the first volume of my Popular Tales and Fictions.
We must regard the first part of this romance—down to the end of the third chapter—as belonging to the wide cycle of folk-tales in which a number of brothers set out in quest of some wonderful and much desired object, and the youngest is always the successful one; but he is deprived of the prize by his envious and malicious brothers, who generally throw him into a well, and returning home claim the credit of the achievement. In the end, however, the young hero exposes the fraud, and his rascally and cowardly brethren are put to shame. Several of the incidents in the brothers’ quest of the magical Rose with which to cure their father’s sight are paralleled in the story of the Water of Life, in Grimm’s Kinder und Hausmärchen, and in the Norse and German stories of the Golden Bird. Thus in our romance the four elder princes, through their pleasure-seeking disposition, fall into the toils of an artful courtesan, while the youngest pluckily proceeds to fairyland and procures the Rose of Bakáwalí, of which his brothers deprive him on his way home. In such stories as I have mentioned the elder brothers, if not deservedly enchanted in some manner on the road, waste their time at a wayside inn, and the younger is aided in his quest by some animal, troll, or dwarf, to whom he had done a friendly turn: in our romance the young prince is helped by a good-natured dív, or demon.
The prediction of the astrologers, with which the romance begins, that if the king should ever cast his eyes on his newly-born son he should instantly become blind, has many analogues in other Eastern tales. For example, in the Bakhtyár Náma we read that a king of Persia, after being long childless, one night, in a dream, is addressed by an aged man: “The Lord has complied with thy request and
