The Anar Pari, or Pomegranate Fairy is an Indian folktale collected by Alice Elizabeth Dracott from Simla. The tale is a local form of tale type ATU 408, "The Love for Three Oranges", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. As with The Three Oranges, the tale deals with a prince's search for a bride that lives in a fruit (a pomegranate), who is replaced by a false bride and goes through a cycle of incarnations, until she regains physical form again. Variants are known across India with other species of fruits.
Summary A king has seven sons, six of which are already married. One day, the queen asks her youngest son what is the matter that he is still single, and suggests he finds himself for his wife the Anar Pari, the most beautiful of fairies.
The prince decides to search for this Anar Pari himself, and journeys until he meets a fakir. The holy man promises to turn him into a parrot, so he can fly to a perilous island where the maiden is located, inside a fruit from a pomegranate tree guarded by dragons. The prince is to reach the tree and pluck the middle one from the tree fruits, and fly back without looking behind him, otherwise his efforts will have been for naught.
The prince, in parrot form, flies to the island in the seventh sea, with the garden and the tree in it. He fetches the fruit and makes a turn back to the fakir, but a dragon begins to chase him. Forgetting the fakir's words, he turns behind him and the dragon burns his body to cinder, then retrieves the fruit.
Noticing the prince's delay, the fakir makes himself invisible and goes to the island, where he finds the parrot's remains. He resurrects the prince and advises him again, so that he does not fail this time. The prince tries to steal the fruit one more time, and manages to do it the second time. He flies back to the fakir's hut, where the man turns him into a fly. The dragons make chase and reach the same hut, where they inquire about the parrot and the fruit. Finding nothing, the dragons depart. Safe now, the fakir restores the prince to human shape, advises him to return to his kingdom and open the pomegranate to release the fairy maiden, bidding him good luck.
Back to his kingdom, the prince decides to open the fruit, and a beautiful maiden comes out of it, of such beauty the youth swoons. The fairy maiden rests the prince's head on her lap, waiting for him to come to. Meanwhile, a low caste woman appears to draw water and finds the pair, asking the fairy about the asleep youth and herself.
The fairy confirms she is the Anar Pari and the youth is the prince of this kingdom, spurring the woman's envy. She convinces the fairy to trade clothes with her and for them to see their reflections in the water. The fairy does as asked and is shoved into a well, while the low caste woman takes place. The prince finally wakes up and, finding the woman and not the fairy, takes her to the palace, despite some initial suspicions.
The prince marries the false princess, who fears she might be discovered if he comes to the well. And so he does: he finds a white lotus flower, which no one but him is able to grab. He brings the flower home. The false princess tears it to pieces and throws it in the garden, where a bed of mint sprouts. A cook takes some mint to use in a meal, and the mint begins to wail about the false princess. Scared, the cook throws the mint away, where a creeper springs and grows under the prince's window. The false princess orders the creeper to the destroyed, but a fruit survives and rolls down a jessamine bush.
The gardener's daughter brings the fruit home. The fairy maiden springs out of the fruit and lives with the gardener's family. One day, the gardener's daughter weaves a garland of flowers, and so does the Anar Pari, who she tells the girl to deliver to the prince. The prince notices that the garland is of exquisite quality and suspects the fairy maiden is still alive.
Back to the false princess, fearing for her life, she feigns illness and asks the prince to procure the heart of a beautiful girl as remedy, specially the one that lives in the gardener's hut. The Anar Pari is once again targeted for execution, and asks that, after her death, her members are to be thrown to the four winds and her eyes cast to space. It happens thus, and her eyes become a pair of lovebirds that settle in the forest.
Some time later, the prince goes to the forest to hunt and listens to the birds talking about the Anar Pari's story, and the false bride by the prince's side. The prince begs the princess to come back to him, and the eyes are restored back to the human form of the Anar Pari, beautiful as always. The prince and the fairy maiden marry and punish the false bride. The gardener's family is also visited by the Anar Pari, and she and the gardener's daughter weave flower garlands together.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 408, "The Three Oranges".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. 135-137. In the Indian variants, the protagonist goes in search of the fairy princess on his sisters-in-law's mocking, finds her and brings her home, but an ugly woman of low social standing kills and replaces her. The fairy princess, then, goes through a cycle of transformations until she regains physical form.Mayeda, Noriko; Brown, W. Norman. Tawi Tales; Folk Tales From Jammu. American Oriental Society New Haven, Connecticut, 1974. p. 537.
In an article in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, scholar Christine Shojaei Kawan separated the tale type into six sections, and stated that parts 3 to 5 represented the "core" of the story:Kawan, Christine Shojaei. "Orangen: Die drei Orangen (AaTh 408)" [Three Oranges (ATU 408)]. In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Online, edited by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Heidrun Alzheimer, Hermann Bausinger, Wolfgang Brückner, Daniel Drascek, Helge Gerndt, Ines Köhler-Zülch, Klaus Roth and Hans-Jörg Uther. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2016 . p. 347. https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/database/EMO/entry/emo.10.063/html. Accessed 2023-06-20.
(1) A prince is cursed by an old woman to seek the fruit princess; (2) The prince finds helpers that guide him to the princess's location; (3) The prince finds the fruits (usually three), releases the maidens inside, but only the third survives; (4) The prince leaves the princess up a tree near a spring or stream, and a slave or servant sees the princess's reflection in the water; (5) The slave or servant replaces the princess (transformation sequence); (6) The fruit princess and the prince reunite, and the false bride is punished.
Motifs The maiden's appearance According to the tale description in the international index, the maiden may appear out of the titular citrus fruits, like oranges and lemons. However, she may also come out of pomegranates or other species of fruits, and even eggs.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. p. 135. In Stith Thompson and 's Oral Tales of India, this motif is indexed as "D211. Transformation: man to fruit".. More specific motifs to the story include "D431.6.1.2. Woman emerges from fruit" and "T543.3. Birth from fruit".
The transformations and the false bride The tale type is characterized by the substitution of the fairy wife for a false bride. The usual occurrence is when the false bride (a witch or a slave) sticks a magical pin into the maiden's head or hair and she becomes a dove. Christine Shojaei-Kawan notes that variants of Indian tradition lack the motif of the false bride mistaking the fruit maiden's reflection in the well for her own. Instead, generally in these tales the hero faints and the fruit princess goes to fetch water to awake him, when a girl of lower caste notices the fruit princess and trades clothes with her, then drowns her in water.Kawan, Christine Shojaei. "Orangen: Die drei Orangen (AaTh 408)" [Three Oranges (ATU 408)]. In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Online, edited by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Heidrun Alzheimer, Hermann Bausinger, Wolfgang Brückner, Daniel Drascek, Helge Gerndt, Ines Köhler-Zülch, Klaus Roth and Hans-Jörg Uther. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2016 . pp. 350-351. https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/database/EMO/entry/emo.10.063/html. Accessed 2024-07-03.
In other variants, the maiden goes through a series of transformations after her liberation from the fruit and regains a physical body. In that regard, according to Christine Shojaei-Kawan's article, Christine Goldberg divided the tale type into two forms. In the first subtype, indexed as AaTh 408A, the fruit maiden suffers the cycle of metamorphosis (fish-tree-human) - a motif Goldberg locates "from the Middle East to Italy and France".Goldberg, Christine. "Imagery and Cohesion in the Tale of the Three Oranges (AT 408)". In: Folk-Narrative and World View. Vortage des 10. Kongresses der Internationalen Gesellschaft fur Volkserzahlungsforschung (ISFNR) - Innsbruck 1992. I. Schneider and P. Streng (ed.). Vol. I, 1996. p. 211. In the second subtype, AaTh 408B, the girl is transformed into a dove by the needle.Shojaei-Kawan, Christine (2004). "Reflections on International Narrative Research on the Example of the Tale of the Three Oranges (AT 408)". In: Folklore (Electronic Journal of Folklore), XXVII, p. 35. In this light, researcher Noriko Mayeda and Indologist W. Norman Brown noted that the fruit maiden "generally" goes from human to flower, then to tree, to fruit again, and finally regains human form.Mayeda, Noriko; Brown, W. Norman. Tawi Tales; Folk Tales From Jammu. American Oriental Society New Haven, Connecticut, 1974. p. 537.
Variants India While organizing the Indic index, Stith Thompson and Warren Roberts noted the close proximity between types 403, "The Black and the White Bride", and 408, "The Three Oranges" - types that deal with the theme of the "Substituted Bride". To better differentiate between them, both scholars remarked that the heroine must be replaced by a female antagonist that is unrelated to her. Thompson's second revision of the international type index listed 17 variants of tale type 408 in India and South Asia.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. p. 137. In some of the Indian tales, the heroine does not come out of a fruit, but she is still replaced by the false bride and goes through a cycle of transformations. Despite this, these stories are indexed as the same tale type.
Examples of stories that lack the heroine's birth from the fruit, but keep the cycle of transformations, include Indian tales Phúlmati Rání, The Apple Princess and Raní Jhajhaní (or Rani Jajhani),Bruyere, Loys. "Contes Arabes et Orientaux III: Les Contes de Miss Putlibai Vadia". In: Revue de Traditions Populaires. Année 4, Tome 4, Numéro 10. Paris: Société des traditions populaires, 1889. pp. 534-536. and Sri Lankan The Maehiyallē-gama Princess. Other tales of the same narrative encompass Sema Naga stories Muchüpile and Tseipu and Kawulipu, Lhota Naga Hunchibili, Zeme Kirumbe, Mizo story Tumchhingi leh Raldawna ("The Story of Tumchhingi & Raldawna"), Thadou Kuki Ashijoul, Lushai The Story of Tlumtea and his Brothers (also called Vanchungnula or Vanchungnula (The maiden of heaven)), and Khasi A Tale of the Takalong Cucumber.
Rupsinh and the Queen of the Anardes