Secondary Tales of the Two Great Epics

Author(s): Rajendra I Nanavati
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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Secondary Tales of the two Great Epics
lead to a climax with the success of the youngest son or daughter. In some tales are "runs", conventional passages, largely nonsense which ornament the tale at appropriate places .... cumulative series further interest teller and hearer .... these devices .. come to be thought indispensable part of folk-tale structure” 86 Even a casual reader of the epics, particularly MBh, cannot fail to notice the various refrains, conventional lists of sages and kings as well as conventional passages of descriptions of palaces, sacrificial wealth, forests, fights and combats, constant use of certain conventional similes, and cumulative series in the form of story-cycles in them.
The Grimm brothers saw that “the same folktale types are scattered over most of Europe and Asia and often far beyond .... they thought of the tales as an inheritance from the Indo-European past and were convinced that, in their present form, they were broken down representatives of ancient myth. A later school, founded by Theodor Benfey in 1859, saw the original home of all these tales in India. Later, anthropologists tried to discredit these theories by showing the universality of most of the ideas and by insisting upon the independent origin, at least of the details of the stories. Attempts at a single explanation of folk-tale origins still engage certain scholars, who find all tales coming from dreams, or from rituals, or else think of them as telling the adventures of the moon or the stars. Later folk-tale scholarship ... has recognised that every tale has its own history ...."37
This means, no single clue for all the tales in any respect can be found, and one or more of the above explanations, which, one after another, claimed to be the origins of all the tales, will possibly hold good in case of various tales. We can roughly point out that some of the myths might claim to have an Indo-European origin, while most of the fables very likely have their original home in India and have travelled from here westward. As Winternity has said it : "Not only have single Indian tales been spread to other peoples by travellers, merchants, and itinerant monks, but even whole Indian books of stories and fables have become the common property of many peoples". 38 In case of the similarity of certain motifs it is difficult to say with any definiteness whether they have independent origins in similar customs, or in some rituals of the local tribes. Various tales, therefore, would have to be considered on their own merits, independently of each other and we should not much expect to arrive at many universal conclusions.
The foregoing quotations about the nature and characteristics of folk-tale and their exemplification shown in the two epics will, we hope, be considered enough to show that there is ample justification in considering these two epics as collections of folk-tales.
36 37 38
ibid, pp. 125-6. ibid, p. 126. Some Problems of Indian Literature, M. Winternitz, Calcutta University, 1925, pp. 68-69.