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32 TWO PRAKRIT VERSIONS OF THE MAŅIPATI-CARITA paramour and posing as a pativratā. She is recognised and her nose and ears are cut off in punishment.
The Pancatantra has a more poetic adaptation of the tale. A brahmin is wandering in the desert after being turned adrift by his family. His wife dies of thirst and as he stands desolate with grief he hears a voice say: 'If you give her half your life she will live again.' He does so and she revives. They set out again and in a garden by a city find a cripple wh sings divinely. Infatuated with him the woman manages to push her husband into a well. Carrying the cripple she goes to another city and there meets her husband who has been saved from death. She accuses him of having mutilated the cripple but he merely replies : Give me back the half of my life', and she dies on the spot. The story is summed up in the verse: .
yad-arthe sva-kulam tyaktam jūvitårddham ca hāritam sā mām tyajati nihsnehā : kaḥ strīņām viśvāsen naraḥ The BKK includes a story (No. 85: Devarati-nypa-kathānaka) the details of which accord closely with those of the MPC but the king is called Devarati and his queen Raktā as in the Bhagavatī Ārādhanā. No reference is made to the errant wife's final fate but the king becomes a digambara monk.
An episode similar to the story of Sukumālikā is included in the SK.1 Dharana, leader of a caravan, escapes with his wife Lakşmi from the attack of a band of Sabaras and is wandering in a waterless forest. To save Lakşmi's life he nourishes her with his own flesh and blood. Later she abandons him for a robber, leaving him to be arrested for a crime of which he is innocent.
The common features of all the narratives the feeding of the wife with the husband's flesh and blood and her infatuation with a pangu ('a cripple' or 'one whose legs have been cut off '). Such infatuation of a high-born woman for a man of the lowest class or for one physically deformed is a not infrequent narrative incident. In the Apabhramśa Yasodhara-carita (11, 9) King Yaśodhara finds his wife keeping an assignment with a hunchback and sees the man kick her because she arrives late. Deformity seems to have been popularly associated with skill in music. It will be recalled that the courtesan Devadattā falls
1 Jacobi's ed., p. 426 ff.
| SR No. | 007017 |
| Book Title | Two Prakrit Versions of Manipati Charitra |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | R Williams |
| Publisher | Royal Asiatic Society |
| Publication Year | 1959 |
| Total Pages | 384 |
| Language | English, Prakrit |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 9 MB |