Secondary Tales of the Two Great Epics

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

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Introductory The Epics and Other Folk-Tale-Collections
As store-houses of popular tales, the epics take their material from the popular floating mass of the folk-literature and as such are comparable to other such collections which also draw their material from the same source. Jātaka collection of tales also, for example, draws its material from the same source. But no attempt is made there to connect these tales in any way. On the contrary, the distinctness of every one of the stories is maintained by providing a different occasion for each one of them, the only flimsy link of connection being that all the stories are supposed to be the incidents of the former births of Lord Buddha himself. Many folk-tales of various types are set into a single grand design wherein they ar shown to help the Master in gradually evolving his personality to perfection by slowly achieving the six päramitās one after another through innumerable births. But the monotonous uniformity of the framing incidents makes the narrations rather dull. Even the Jain collections of tales (such as the Běhat-kathā-kośa of Harişeņa89) mostly give us unconnected tales, there being some such nominal link like that all of them are illustrative of the maxims preached by Lord Mahāvīra or something like that.
More clearly comparable with the epics, formwise, are the indigenous collections like the Kathā-sarit-sāgara (KSS) or Simhāsana-dvātrimśikā (SD) or even Pañcatantra (PT) or Hitopadeśa or occidental collections like the Arbian Nights (AN) or Boccaccio's Decameron or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. All these collections which also draw upon the floating mass of popular tales for their material, have a welldeveloped frame-story to embox the stray tales. The difference, obviously, is that in all these collections the frame-stories are meant to function as frame-stories, and are designed as such right from the beginning. To put it differently, these framestories mostly consist of single episodes in which there is an occasion deliberately created to include the secondary tales. On the other hand the connected epic-tale has many episodes and, therefore, many more occasions to insert the secondary tales. But it should be noted that such occasions in the epics are, at the most, only potential, and not deliberate. The story is not narrated originally with a view to include secondary tales, rather it is intended to be an interesting narrative complete in itself. And when the potential occasions are taken advantage of to insert secondary tales, the formal unity of the original epic narrative is bound to be adversely affected. Whereas the folk-tale-collections are not in any such danger of the deformation of their formal unity, since narration of independent tales is their principal motive, and the frame-story which is the main story is narrated primarily to provide an occasion for their narration. The epics, as we saw above, profess to narrate only one single connected narrative and therefore, when fresh stories are sought to be included in them, the epic-stories become only pegs upon which to hang the intruding stories 39 The work is edited by Dr. A. N. Upadhye, and published (1943) by Bharatiya Vidya
Bhavan, Bombay.