Princess Aubergine (Baingan Bádsháhzádí) is an Indian folktale collected by Flora Annie Steel and sourced from the Punjab region. It concerns a princess whose lifeforce is tied to a necklace, and, as soon as it falls in the hand of a rival, the princess falls into a death-like sleep - comparable to heroines of European fairy tales Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.Tatar, Maria. The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2020. pp. 94-101. Variants exist in India, both with a heroine and a hero whose life is attached to a magical necklace.
Sources Richard Carnac Temple sourced the tale from an old woman of Purbia origin, at Kasur near Lahore.Steel, Flora Annie. "Baingan Bádsháhzádí - Prince Aubergine". In: Indian antiquary v. 9, 1880. p. 302 (Note 1).
Summary A poor Brahman and his wife live in such a state of poverty, they resort to gathering roots and herbs to eat. One day, the Brahman finds an eggplant and brings it home to plant. He and his wife water it and it yields a large, purple fruit. The Brahman's wife takes a knife to cut open the large eggplant in the garden. When she stabs the large fruit, a low moan is heard. The wife stabs it again and a voice inside it the eggplant begs for the woman to be careful. The wife opens the eggplant and finds a little maiden inside, dressed in white and purple garments. The Brahman and his wife decide to adopt the girl as their daughter and name her Princess Aubergine.
Next to the Brahman's hut, a king lives with his queen and seven sons. One day, a slave-girl from the palace goes to the Brahman's hut to ask for some light, and sees Princess Aubergine. So lovely is she, that the slave-girl rushes back to the palace to tell the queen about her. The queen, despite being beautiful herself, is told that the Brahman's daughter is even more beautiful than her, and fears the king will replace her.
So the queen devises a plan: she invites Princess Aubergine to the palace, and convinces the girl to live there with her as the queen's sister. Time passes, and the Queen, adept in the arts of magic, learns through her powers that the Princess Aubergine is a fairy, and, while the maiden is asleep, casts spells on her to reveal the location of her lifeforce. The Princess murmurs that her lifeforce is in the queen's first son; by killing him, the queen will kill Aubergine.
The queen kills her firstborn son, and sends the servant-girl to check on Princess Aubergine, who is still alive. Failing her first attempt to kill the maiden, the queen goes back to enchanting the girl for her to disclose her secret. The princess keeps telling that her lifeforce lies in each of the queen's other sons, which are killed every time.
After all her sons have been killed, the queen, fueled with rage, manages to enchant Aubergine with even more powerful spells for her to reveal the location of her lifeforce: in a nine-lakh necklace, inside a tiny box, inside a bumblebee, inside a red and green fish that lives in a river somewhere far away.
The queen convinces her husband, the king, to procure her the nine-lakh necklace, like some sort of comfort due to the sudden loss of their sons, who, according to the queen, have died of a "mysterious illness". The king brings back the fish and the queen finds the fabled necklace. Meanwhile, Princess Aubergine, sensing her approaching death, goes back to her adoptive parents' hut and tells the Brahman to prepare her resting place: they must not bury her, but set her on her bed, deep in the wilderness, surround it with flowers, and build a mudwall around it.
The Brahman and his wife follow her instructions, and the queen's slave-girl reports back that Aubergine is not buried, by lies out in the open. The queen contents herself with this small victory, since she still has the necklace.
One day, the king decides to go on a hunt to occupy his mind off the loss of his seven sons, but the queen warns him against hunting in the north. The king hunts in the east, in the west, and in the south, and, out of options, begins to hunt in the north. The king sees the mudwall and the bed of flowers that surround Princess Aubergine's body. The king becomes entranced by her beauty and begins a long, secret vigil on her body. After a year, a son appears next to the maiden's body, and, some time later, the boy tells the king his mother, the maiden, comes alive at night to care for him, and dies in the morning.
The king then asks the boy about his origins, and the boy answers that he is the king's son and Aubergine's, sent to console him after the death of the king's seven sons by the hands of the queen. The boy also reveals that Aubergine can be revived by retrieving the nine-lakh necklace around the queen's neck, but he is the only one that can get it.
The king brings the boy with him to the palace. The queen, seeing the boy, tries to give him poisoned food, but the boy refuses to touch the food until the queen gives him the necklace to play. The queen, wanting to see the boy eat the food, gives him the necklace, and he hurries back to his mother Aubergine to revive her.
Upon placing the necklace on his mother, Princess Aubergine awakens. The king goes to her and talks her into coming to the palace with him and becoming his bride, but Aubergine refuses, until the king digs up a ditch, fills it with snakes and scorpions, and throws the queen inside it. The king orders some servants to fulfill her orders, then tells the queen to come see something with him. Despite refusing, the queen is seized by the guards, tied up, thrown in the ditch and buried alive. Princess Aubergine and her son come to live in the palace with the king.Steel, Flora Annie. "Baingan Bádsháhzádí - Prince Aubergine". In: Indian antiquary v. 9, 1880. pp. 302-304.Steel, F. Annie Webster; Temple, R. Carnac. (1884). Wide-awake stories: a collection of tales told by little children, between sunset and sunrise, in the Panjab and Kashmir. Bombay: Education Society's Press, 1884. pp. 79-88.Steel, F. Annie Webster; Kipling, J. Lockwood. (1894). Tales of the Punjab told by the people. London: Macmillan, 1894. pp. 71-79.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 412, "The Maiden (Youth) with a Separable Soul in a Necklace".Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Third Printing. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1973 . p. 139. According to Kannada scholarship, in type 412, a rival steals the heroine's necklace, which contains her life, and she dies; the heroine's love interest finds her and has a child with her; the heroine then sends her child to steal her necklace from her rival and returns to life. Folklorist Stith Thompson included in the same tale type stories about a heroine and a hero whose soul lies in a magical necklace.
According to German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther, in the 2004 revision of the international index, tale type ATU 412 can appear in combination with another tale type: ATU 404, "The Blinded Bride". In this type, the heroine is blessed at birth by good spirits with the ability to produce gold with her tears and her hands, but, later in life, is blinded by a jealous rival, until a helper buys back her eyes.
Motifs The tale contains the motif E711.4, "Soul in necklace".Thompson, Stith; Balys, Jonas. The Oral Tales of India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. p. 169.
Richard C. Temple stated that the original name of the tale, also known as baingan, bingan, begun and bhâņṭâ, refers to the plant Solanum melongena, that is, the eggplant or the aubergine.Steel, F. Annie Webster; Kipling, J. Lockwood. (1894). Tales of the Punjab told by the people. London: Macmillan, 1894. p. 305.
Variants India Richard C. Temple noted that the tale "abound[ed] in various forms in the Pânjâb". In the second revision of the index, published in 1961, Stith Thompson located 7 variants in India.
In an Indian tale titled Princess Brinjal, a poor gardener asks a Koiri for alms, and is given a brinjal. The gardener's goes home, places the brinjal in a pot and cooks it. A rattle inside the pot draws the gardener's attention and he opens the pot to see a fairy (peri) and a "heavenly mansion" inside it. The princess introduces herself as "Princess Brinjal" and turns the gardener's poor hut in a grand palace, and they live together. Some time later, an Anir's wife goes to the Princess Brinjal and gives her some milk and curds, and is paid with a pearl. She goes to the Rája's palace to sell milk and curds, and is given wheat husks. She comments to a gatekeeper about Princess Brinjal's generosity, and the gatekeeper tells the Ráni about it. The Ráni fears her husband might want Brinjal as his new wife and decides to poison her. She goes to Brinjal's palace, who invites her in, despite knowing her plan. The Ráni, in turn, invites Brinjal to her palace, but she asks for the Ráni to pave a road between their palaces and decorate it with curtains, so that no man can see her. Princess Brinjal goes to the Ráni's palace. The Ráni tries to poison the princess with the food, but the princess declines to eat any dish. However, goaded by the Ráni, the princess tells her about a ruby necklace inside a box, located on the branches of a pipal tree. After the princess leaves, the Ráni asks her husband to get the necklace. He does and Princess Brinjal falls dead. Before she dies, she asks the gardener to build a tomb and lay her there. Time passes, and the Rája visits Brinjal's resting place. He drinks some water and eats half of a pomegranate. The same night, Brinjal awakens and eats the other half. She and the Rája fall in love and have a son. Brinjal tells the Ráj about the necklace; he takes it back from the Ráni and executes her, making Brinjal his new queen.North Indian Notes and Queries Volume 4. 1895. p. 117. The tale was sourced to a person named Ali Sajjad, a village accountant from Mirzapur, and collected by Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube, and also noted to be an "imperfect version" of Princess Aubergine.North Indian Notes and Queries Volume 4. 1895. p. 117 (Note).
Author M. N. Venkataswami collected an Indian tale titled The Fakeer's Daughter and the Wicked Queen. In this tale, a poor fakeer is visited by an even poorer fakeer in search of alms. The first fakeer's daughter becomes irritated with the second fakeer's insistence and drops a ladle of hot keer on the second fakeer's head, creating a blister on his hand. The second fakeer is instructed by the "angels from heaven" to let the blister be and, nine months later, a baby girl sprouts from the blister and asks for nourishing. The girl grows up and becomes a beautiful maiden. The rani of the place learns of the maiden's beauty, far surpassing her own, and decides to get rid of her, so she sends some servants to meet the maiden. The servants notice the "carcanet" (a collar) of jewels around her neck and, after a denied polite request, they take the jewels by force and bring them to the Rani. After the carcanet is hung up in the queen's room, the maiden dies. Her father, the second fakeer, is warned in a dream to place the body out in the open, under a sandalwood tree. Next to the body, flowers sprout and their fragrance draws the Raja to the maiden's resting place. He goes to pluck a beeda and eat, but four invisible paris ask him to bring back the jewels from the queen's room. The Raja takes the carcanet and places it on the sleeping maiden, who comes back to life, gives the beeda to the Raja and marries him, while the Rani is executed.Venkataswami M. N. Heeramma And Venkataswami Or Folktales From India. Madras: Diocesan Press. 1923. pp. 96-98.