Kiranmala (Bengali: কিরণমালা) is a Bengali folktale collected by author Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder and published in the compilation Thakurmar Jhuli (; Grandmother's Bag [of tales]), a collection of Bengali folk tales and fairy tales.
The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children", a cycle of stories a woman promises a king she will bear a child or children with wonderful attributes, but her jealous relatives or the king's wives plot against the babies and their mother.Espinosa, Aurelio M. “Comparative Notes on New-Mexican and Mexican Spanish Folk-Tales.” In: The Journal of American Folklore 27, no. 104 (1914): 230. https://doi.org/10.2307/534598. Many variants of the tale type are registered in the Indian Subcontinent, although they comprise specific cycles in this country. In one of the cycles, the king's children are sent on dangerous quests to find marvellous items.
Translations The tale has been published as Kirunmala, or the Wreath of Light, by author Francis Bradley Bradley-Birt;Bradley-Birt, Francis Bradley; and Abanindranath Tagore. Bengal Fairy Tales. London: John Lane, 1920. pp. 162–167. as The Story of Kiranmala by Geeta Majumdar;Majumdar, Geeta. Folk Tales of Bengal. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1960. pp. 35-51. as Kiranmala by Sayantani DasGupta, and as Arun, Barun, and Kiranmala.Shankar. Treasury of Indian tales. New Delhi: Children's Book Trust, 1993. pp. 115-125. Folklorist Sohinder Singh Wanjara Bedi republished the tale with the title The Golden Sparrow.
Summary The king wanders the streets at night to listen to his subjects' opinion of him, and stops by a house where three sisters are talking to one another: the first wanting to marry the feeder of the king's horses, the second to the royal cook, and the third to the king himself. The king brings them all to his presence the next day and marries the youngest.
Time passes, and the young queen is ready to give birth, but asks to be nursed by her elder sisters, instead of stranger. Unbeknownst to her, her sisters have begun to nurture envy at their cadette's fortunate marriage, and seize the opportunity to bring harm to her. The first time, the queen gives birth to a young boy, whom the elder sister replaced with a cur and throw him in the river in an earthen pot. The second time, the queen gives birth to another boy, who is replaced by a kitten, and in the following year, a girl is born, but a doll is put in her place. Thinking his wife is an evil woman, the king banishes her from the palace to sit astride a donkey.
As for the children, the two siblings share the fate of their elder, and are abandoned in the river in an earthen pot. However, each time a Brahmin, who was making his devotions near the river, finds each pot and rescues them, then raises them as their own. The Brahmin names the boys Arun and Barun (Varun) and the girl Kirunmala. After he dies, the siblings meet the king after a heavy storm on the road, and decide to build a palace. One day, a fakir passes by their palace, compliments their fine abode, but suggests the girl to send her brothers for "a silver tree with flowers of gold, a tree of diamonds with birds of gold perched on it; and a canopy of a net made of pearls" (In Wanjara Bedi's printed version, a "golden sparrow, a tree of silver and a spring of jewels"). In this tale, the water is only used to disenchant Kirunmala's petrified brothers, and one of the birds of gold convinces them to invite the king to a banquet.Bradley-Birt, Francis Bradley; and Abanindranath Tagore. Bengal Fairy Tales. London: John Lane, 1920. pp. 162–167.Basu, Subrata. “Kiranmala”. In: Indian Literature 51, no. 6 (242) (2007): 111–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347645.Flora, Giuseppe. “On Fairy Tales, Intellectuals and Nationalism in Bengal (1880-1920)”. In: Rivista Degli Studi Orientali 75 (2002): 65–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41913063.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children".Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. pp. 242–243.
According to Stith Thompson' and Jonas Balys's index of Indian tales, the tale type ATU 707 shows 44 variants across Indian sources.Crowley, Daniel J. "Haring's Herring: Theoretical Implications of the "Malagasy Tale Index"." In: Journal of Folklore Research 23, no. 1 (1986): 46, 48. Accessed May 19, 2023. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3814480. In addition, researcher Noriko Mayeda and Indologist W. Norman Brown divided Indian variants of type 707 in five groups: (1) quest for wonderful items; (2) reincarnation into flowers; (3) use of wooden horses; (4) children sing a song; (5) miscellaneous.Mayeda, Noriko; Brown, W. Norman. Tawi Tales; Folk Tales From Jammu. American Oriental Society New Haven, Connecticut, 1974. pp. 543-544.
Professor Ashutosh Bhattacharjya described that Kiranmala has a "distant similarity" to the Bengali tale Saat Bhai Champa.
Motifs According to Giuseppe Flora, Kiran means 'ray, beam (of light)'. As for her brothers' names, Arun derives from Aruṇa, a Hindu deity associated with the sunrise and whose name means 'the reddish one'.Flora, Giuseppe. “On Fairy Tales, Intellectuals and Nationalism in Bengal (1880-1920)”. In: Rivista Degli Studi Orientali 75 (2002): 66 (footnote nr. 208). http://www.jstor.org/stable/41913063. Also, in the original, the silver tree is called rūpār gācha, the diamond tree is hīrār gācha, and the bird of gold is sonār pākhī.Flora, Giuseppe. “On Fairy Tales, Intellectuals and Nationalism in Bengal (1880-1920)”. In: Rivista Degli Studi Orientali 75 (2002): 67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41913063.
Variants India Indian author M. N. Venkataswami published an Indian tale titled The Two Princes and Their Sister: a poor woman has three daughters. One day, a fairy, under the guise of an old woman, is welcomed by the youngest and kind third sister into their house. The fairy blesses their house and leaves. One night, the three sister talk to one another: the eldest promises she can weave a great sail for a vessel, if she maries a captain; the middle one promises to give birth to a boy if she marries a king; and the youngest promises to give birth to twins, a boy with a golden chain on his neck and a girl with two stars on the front if she marries a prince. Coincidentally, a ship's captain, a king and a prince just happen to pass by the house at the exact moment and overhear their conversation. The men take each of the sisters as their respective wives. Jealous of the luck of the younger ones, the eldest sister deceives her brothers-in-law by replacing the king's son for a block and the prince's children for animals, and casting the babies in the water. The babies are saved by a country merchant and looked after by the fairy that visited their biological mothers years ago. When they are grown up, their aunt, the ship's captain's wife, sends them after the dancing-water, the singing apple and the singing bird that sings songs from "all climes and nationalities". According to Venkataswami's preface, the tale was provided by a Tamil herbalist named R. J. Samuel, who heard it from a Tamil pandit in the early 1870s.
In an Indian tale collected by John W. Spellman with the title The King's True Children, a king has six wives, and yet no children. One day, he finds himself a beautiful princess whom he makes his seventh wife. When the seventh queen is pregnant, they become jealous of her, and, after the king leaves on a hunt, the queen's first child, a son, is taken from her, cast in the river in a basket and replaced by a stone. The baby prince is rescued by an old fisherman, who takes the boy to raise with his wife. The next year, the seventh queen gives birth to a girl, who is also cast in the river by the jealous co-queens and replaced by another stone. Tricked by his co-wives, the king demotes his seventh spouse to shoo away crows in the garden. As for the children, the fisherman couple raises them until, on day, the boy has a dream about a yogi beckoning him on a pilgrimage towards a sacred stream. Deciding to chase the vision from his dream, the elder sibling departs and journeys beyond mountains until he finds the yogi near the sacred stream. The holy man gives him a catamaran, two water pots, and warns the boy to always look ahead while on the river, and to not look back. The boy follows the yogi's warnings and sails to the source of the river, deep into a cave, but demons in the deep darkness of the cave frighten and grab at his clothes, he turns his head to glance behind. Back at the fisherman's cottage, the female sibling realizes her elder brother is in danger and follows the same trail to the yogi. She meets the holy man and is given the same instructions: the girl sails on the catamaran and always looks straight ahead, until she reaches the source of the stream and fills the water pots with the liquid. The cave suddenly illuminates and she finds the unmoving figures of pilgrims and sprinkles the water on them, reverting their immobile state. She reunites with her elder brother and they return home. Later, the king learns of the girl's deed and pays the fisherman's cottage a visit with his six co-queens, the seventh their servant and fanning them. The fisherman tells the story of how he found the children floating in the river, and the seventh queen realizes the pair are her children. The king hears the queen's story, proving the injustice done to her, then banishes the elder co-queens to wander the forest, and reinstates his children and their mother.
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