Vetāla 14: The Merchant’s Daughter who fell in love with a Thief

Click the link to jump directly to the english translation of the fourteenth Vetāla. This page only contains the notes.

There are several differences in each of the two chief vernacular versions.

In the Hindi^[1] (No. 13) version no mention is made of the girl’s dislike for men. In searching for the thief it is the king who asks the other man who he is. On finding they are both of the same profession they proceed to rob several houses. They take their loot to a well outside the city, which proves to be really an entrance to Pātāla, where the real thief dwells. The king is warned by a female servant and, being shown the way back, effects his escape. Another day the complete army go down the well and surround the thief’s house. He manages, however, to escape to a demon who is lord of the city and implores his aid. Accordingly, remembering past benefits, the demon destroys most of the army.

The king is in flight, when the thief calls out:

“Hola! thou a Rājpūt, and fleeing from combat?”

At this the king stops, fights the thief, and finally overcomes him. He then has the thief bathed, finely clad, and paraded through the streets on a camel, and so to be led to the stake of impalement. The girl’s father offers the king five lakhs for the thief’s release, but in vain. When she is about to become a Satī, the goddess Devī appears and grants a boon. The girl immediately craves that life be restored to the thief. There is no mention of the request about her father having a hundred sons. The answer to the Vetāla’s question will be discussed later.

In the Tamil version^[2] the story is No. 17 of the collection. It begins as in Somadeva: the king, however, does not trouble to have the city watched, but goes to see to matters for himself at once, apparently without any kind of disguise.

He meets the thief

“who was the chief of all the robbers, with his body blackened,^[3] his head bare, girded with a black cincture, and wearing a weapon to cleave asunder those who opposed him.”

When asked by the king who he is, the thief replies:

“I am the son of Bhadra Kāli, the tutelary goddess of this neighbourhood, and I am going my rounds about the town.”

“Very well,” replied the king,

“come and be chief guard of my palace.”

The thief can do nothing but comply. He makes, however, an attempt to secure assistance, by calling to some of his accomplices in thieves’ language. He is overheard, the other thieves are slain, and he himself is led off, smeared in sandalwood, with a garland round his neck, to the place of impalement. Then follows the incident of the daughter’s request to her father as in our version. He presents himself before the king and offers a cat’s-eye (chrysoberyl) as a present, and promises to give “great riches” if his Majesty will release the thief.

The king refuses indignantly, saying:

“You must be yourself a thief, who come thus to speak in behalf of a robber. Get out of my presence!”

When she was about to become a Satī, Śiva and his consort,

“who had viewed all these transactions from the sky, called out to the damsel from the bull-vehiele on which they were seated, and said:

‘Ask whatever gift you desire’; to which she replied: ‘I wish you to raise up this robber and present him to me.’

They were delighted with her constancy, and having resuscitated the robber, delivered him over to her, and went to Cailāsam.”

Once again there is no mention of the girl’s first request about her father.

Although the above versions differ in several minor incidents from that of our text, no new motifs are introduced. Somadeva alone makes the distracted girl think first of her father, although about to die. The tale contains several interesting motifs. Almost at the commencement we read of the heroine’s hatred of men. This motif occupies a very minor place in the story, and, as we have seen above, disappears entirely in the Hindi version. No explanation is given as to why she hated men or to account for her sudden passion for the thief. In the Nights, however, the motif assumes a more important form, and the hatred of men by the princess is accounted for by a dream in which she sees the cruelty and desertion of the male sex. It is only after a clever trick of the lover that the princess is persuaded that she was mistaken. The two stories in which this occurs are “Tale of Tāj al-Mulūk and the Princess Dunyā” (Burton, vol. iii, p. 31 et seq.) and “Ardaṣīr and Hayāt al-Nufūs” (idem., vol. vii, p. 227 et seq.).

We pass on to the more important motifs. An appropriate name for the thieving motif occurring in our story, and also later in Chapter CXII, is hard to express in a single short sentence. I have chosen “tracking the thief,” but it really covers only one aspect of the motif —namely, the tracking of the thief by the king in disguise—somewhat similar to the nocturnal adventures indulged in by Harūn al-Raṣīd in the Nights. (See the Ocean, Vol. VI, p.37n^l.) Although the famous Caliph might well be regarded as the stock type for such habits, his name cannot be given to the motif, as so many of his rambles were made in order to discover what the people really thought about him, or merely in the hope of finding some amusing adventure.

With the scope of the motif thus qualified, I proceed.

As mentioned in Vol. II, p.183n¹, the arch-thief of Hindu fiction is Mūladeva, who figures personally in the next Vetāla story. Although the great majority of stories about him deal with his clever tricks and wonderful escapes, there is a tale in Jacobi’s Ausgewählte Erzählungen in Māhārāṣṭrī which tells how Mūladeva became King of Beṇṇāyaḍa under the name of Vikramarāja. He was elected to the throne by the rite of pañcadivyādhivāsa. The passage (from Meyer’s translation, Hindu Tales, p. 212) has already been given in my note on the rite (Vol. V, p. 176). In his new rôle of king Mūladeva soon proves himself an exemplary protector of his land, and, following the dictum laid down in the Arthaśāstra,^[4] becomes the terror of thieves and rogues. It is at this point of his career that he acts like King Vīraketu of our text.

The story well merits reproduction^[5]:

In the city of Beṇṇāyaḍa lived a beggar, named Maṇḍiya, addicted to stealing other people’s property. He spread the report that he was suffering from loathsome sores, and kept his knees covered with ointment; and swathed in bandages, he hobbled along with apparent difficulty, supporting his feet with a staff.

By day he begged, by night he dug breaches into houses [see Vol. V, p.142n²], stole much property, and deposited it in a cave [Meyer reads “an underground dwelling”] in the environs of the town. There also lived his sister, a maiden. In the middle of the cave was a well. And every accomplice whom the thief enticed by means of money and brought there as a carrier of the loot, his sister bade sit down on a seat previously placed near the well, and taking hold of their feet, under the pretext of washing them, she pushed them into the well, where they perished.

Thus Maṇḍiya continued in his robberies, the guards being unable to catch him. The citizens’ complaints reached Mūladeva’s ears, so he appointed a new chief of the guard; but he also could not catch the thief. Then Mūladeva himself, clad in a dark robe, went out that night and sat down near a certain gambling-hall [Meyer: “shed”].

Maṇḍiya came along and asked: “Who sits here?”

Mūladeva answered: “I am a beggar.”

Maṇḍiya said: “Come, I’ll make a man of you!”

Mūladeva got up. A breach was dug into the house of a rich man, and the thief took out great treasures, which he loaded upon Mūladeva. They proceeded outside the city, Mūladeva in front, the thief with drawn sword behind.

When they had arrived at the cave, Maṇḍiya began to bury the treasure.

He said to his sister: “Wash the feet of this guest.”

She bade him sit down on the seat at the brink of the well, and took hold of his foot, under pretence of washing it.

Observing its delicacy, she guessed that he was a person of quality [Meyer: “limbs were weakly”], and pity sprung up in her heart.

She made a signal on the flat of his foot, “Flee, lest you die!”

So he did, and she cried after him: “He has fled! He has fled!”

Maṇḍiya drew his sword, and pursued the king on the highway. When Mūladeva perceived that Maṇḍiya was close upon him, he hid behind a liṅga of Śiva on the square. The thief mistook it for the figure of a man, cleft it, and returned to his underground dwelling [Meyer: “having stayed there overnight”]. In the morning he begged in the market-place. Thence the king had him brought to his presence, treated him courteously, and asked his sister for wife. Maṇḍiya gave her to the king with a dowry. After a time the king told Maṇḍiya that he needed money. Maṇḍiya procured it, and was honoured by the king. The king kept asking for more, until he learned from the sister (his wife) that Maṇḍiya had no more.

Thereupon the king returned the goods to their rightful owners, and ordered Maṇḍiya to be impaled upon a stake.

The similarity of the above with our tale is considerable, and it does not lose by the omission of the girl’s sudden love for the thief. Cf. Naṭeśa Śāstri’s Folklore in Southern India, p. 53 et seq.

The motif also occurs in two other tales in Jacobi’s work mentioned above. They concern the means by which Agaladatta (Agaḍadatta) tracks down a thief who is constantly pillaging the city.

Some idea of the usual lurking-places of thieves is given when Agaladatta starts on his search:

“In the houses of prostitutes, in taprooms, in gambling places, and in the stalls of the bakers; in sheds of the parks, where one can get water to drink, in the huts of ascetics, in empty temples, in the squares, in bazaars and markets, he fearlessly stalked his prey.”

The thief turns out to be a mendicant who behaves as does Maṇḍiya in the story quoted above. The mendicant is killed, and his daughter is taken off by Agaladatta, who receives the king’s daughter as a reward. Without giving further examples of the use of the “catching the thief” motif I would refer readers to Bloomfield’s excellent article “The Art of Stealing in Hindu Fiction,” Amer. Journ. Phil., vol. liv, 1923, pp. 194-202. He deals with the “Romance” part of the story on pp. 221-225, to which we now proceed.

In the Kathākoça (Tawney, p. 215) the Princess Dava-dantī takes pity on a condemned thief and by means of an “act of truth” breaks his bonds and scatters the guards. Cf. also p. 126 of the same work. “Pity’s akin to love,” as we soon discover in following the development of our motif.

In the Kaṇavera Jātaka (No. 318, Cambridge edition, vol. iii, p. 42) Sāmā, the chief courtesan of the King of Benares, falls in love^[6] with a thief who is being led off to execution. She accordingly bribes the governor to say that the thief is her brother and must therefore be allowed to escape. He consents, but only if a substitute be found.

Ṅow the price of Sāmā’s favours was a thousand pieces, and that night a rich young merchant calls at her house with the required sum. Sāmā places the money in her lap and bursts into tears. On the merchant’s inquiring the cause, she replies:

“My lord, this robber is my brother, though he never comes to me, because people say I follow a vile trade. When I sent a message to the governor, he intimated that for a thousand he would let the prisoner go. And now I cannot find anyone to go.”

The youth volunteers to take the money. He is mistaken for the substitute and executed. Sāmā then lives with the thief in luxury. The sequel is most dramatic. As time goes on the thief thinks that a woman who was capable of such an amazing act might easily turn on him if she found another love she preferred. He therefore leads her into a thicket and chokes her, leaving her for dead. On regaining consciousness Sāmā harbours no thought of revenge, but still wants her lover. She sends out strolling actors with a message in verse. At last they find the thief, but he is taking no risks, and sends back a verse of refusal. The actors return and make a full report. Whereupon Sāmā plunges once more into a life of debauchery and prostitution.

The story occurs again in the Jātakas,^[7] but the ending is different. The thief tells the girl of his evil intentions, and she begs as a mark of final devotion to be allowed to circumambulate him. This request he grants, and when Sulasā is behind him flings him down a mountain precipice with superhuman strength.

For further parallels see Burliṅgame, Buddhist Legends (Harvard Oriental Series, vol. xxix), vol. ii, p. 227.

There still remains the “Laugh and Cry” motif to be considered, but as this occurs again in Vetāla 23, and the “Laugh” motif alone in Vetala 20, I shall leave the discussion of both its varieties till we deal with these tales in question (see pp. 253, 260). Suffice it to point out here that the answer given to the Vetāla’s question as to why the thief first wept and then laughed differ in Hindi and Tamil versions. In both of these he laughs first, which I consider less dramatic than as in our text.

In the Hindi, however, the reply changes the order, for the text says, “He first burst out laughing, and then began to weep bitterly,” while the explanation given is:

“He reflected that he could not requite her kindness in being willing to give up her whole property to save his life, and this reflection deeply grieved him. Then it struck him as very odd that she should fall in love with a man just about to suffer death: that the proceedings of the Deity were inscrutable; that he bestows prosperity on the inauspicious; knowledge on one destitute of high lineage; a beautiful wife on a fool; and showers upon hills: thus reflecting, he laughed.”

In the Tamil version the order remains throughout.

“First he laughed,” replied the king,

“to think that such an extraordinary event should have taken place, although the girl had not been previously acquainted with him; then he wept, being moved to compassion, when he saw the affliction of her father and mother.”

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Barker, op. cit., p. 211 et seq.

[2]:

Babington, op. cit., p. 71 et seq.

[3]:

In a note Babington points out that the blackened bodies of thieves were also anointed [with grease?], so that the police would have difficulty in catching hold of them. In order to obviate this the “tiger’s-claw,” a sort of knuckle-duster with curved claws, is employed. This baghnakh or wagnuck was the weapon with which Śivājī murdered Afzal Khān. See Duff’s History of the Mahrattas, vol. i, p. 172.

[4]:

“The king should protect his subjects against the rascalities of thieves, robbers, cheats and other rogues” (Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, iv, 6).

[5]:

I follow Bloomfield’s translation (see later) of Jacobi's work already cited, supplemented by Meyer’s rendering in Hindu Tales, p. 223 et seq.

[6]:

For the “Devoted Hetæra” motif see Bloomfield, Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., vol. lii, p. 630 et seq.

[7]:

Sulasā Jātaka, No. 419, Cambridge edition, vol. iii, p. 260 et seq.