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 to-morrow thou shalt have a son, but in his seventh year a lion shall seize and carry him off to the top of a mountain, from which he shall fall, rolling in blood and clay.” The vazírs say that the decrees of Destiny cannot be withstood, but the king declares that he will do so, and then summons his astrologers, who say that the king after twenty years shall perish by the hand of his own son. The king causes an underground dwelling to be constructed, in which he places his child and the nurse. When the prince is seven years of age, a lion rushes into the cave, devours the nurse, carries off the boy, and drops him down a mountain. The child is found by one of the king’s secretaries, who causes him to be properly educated. In course of time the youth is appointed armour-bearer to the king, who, of course, does not know that he is his own son, and in fighting with an enemy who had invaded his kingdom, in the confusion of the battle, the youth cuts off the king’s hand, supposing him to be on the enemy’s side, and before dying the king ascertains that his son had caused his death.
In the Bagh o Bahár (see the Appendix, page 478), a young prince, in consequence of a prediction of the astrologers that he was menaced with great danger until his fourteenth year, is confined in a vault lined with felt, in order that he should not behold the sun and the moon till the fatal period was passed. In Mr. Ralston’s Tibetan Tales, the diviners declare to a king that he shall have a son who shall take his life and usurp the royal power, setting the diadem on his own head. And we have a familiar instance in the Arabian tale of the Third Calender, where the astrologers having predicted that the newly-born son of a jeweller should be killed when fifteen years old by ’Ajíb the son of King Khasib, the child is placed in an underground apartment in an island. In the Turkish story-book known as the History of the Forty Vasírs, the soothsayers predict that a king’s son shall be much afflicted and wander in strange lands, with tribulation and pain for his companions, from his thirtieth till he has attained his sixtieth year. In the Norwegian story of Rich Peter the Pedlar the star-gazers foretell that his daughter should one day wed a poor man’s son. And in classical legends we have the story of Danae, the daughter of Acrisius, king of Argos, by Eurydice, who was confined in a brazen tower because an oracle had said that his daughter’s son should put him to death.
V—The Persian Stories have been selected from a collection translated by Mr. Edward Rehatsek, and published at Bombay in 1871, under the title of Amusing Stories. They occur in the Persian work, Mahbúb ul-Kalúb, of which some account has been given in connection with the first two romances in the present volume. The first of these stories, that of the Three Deceitful Women, is very diverting, and, as I have shown in the Appendix, has its counterparts in France and Spain. It belongs to the numerous stories of the Woman’s Wiles cycle, and certainly represents the ladies in no very amiable character. But as a set-off to this tale of the depravity of women—the subject of many European mediæval stories