The Belbati Princess is an Indian folktale, from the Ho people in Eastern India, collected by Cecil Henry Bompas. The tale is a local form of the tale "The Love for Three Oranges", which is classified as type ATU 408 of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (ATU). As with The Three Oranges, the tale deals with a prince's search for a bride that lives in a fruit (a bel-fruit), 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.
Sources Author Cecil Henry Bompas collected the tale from a Ho source in Santal Parganas. According to Indian anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy, the tale was "current among the Hos of Singbhum". In another line of scholarship, the tale is said to resemble tales of Bengal's "cultural orbit", and its appearance in the "tribal belt" is "somewhat unexpected". The tale was also republished and sourced from Bihar.
Summary
In this tale, six of seven brothers are married, save for the youngest, Lita. He will marry no one save for the Belbati Princess. His sisters-in-law mock him for it, but he leaves to find her. He meets three holy muni who direct him to a garden with rakshasas that guard the bel tree with the fruit that holds the princess. The third muni warns him the he must seek the biggest bel fruit.
Lita enters the garden and steals one of the smaller ones; the Rakshasas gang up on him and devour the boy. The muni sends a crow to find him, and bids the bird brings the Rakshasas' excrement to the muni. The holy man revives Lita and turns him into a parakeet; Lita flies to the garden, steals the fruit, and returns to the muni, who tells him to open the fruit only by a certain well. In a hurry, Lita rushes to the well and falls to the ground, accidentally cracking open the bel fruit. The Belbati Princess comes out of the fruit in a blaze of light that kills Lita. The princess asks a passing girl of the Kamar caste (from the blacksmith caste, in another translation) for some water to revive him. The Kamar girl, cunningly, says she cannot reach the water in the well, and the princess says she will do it herself. The Kamar girl then complains she will not stand by the boy's corpse, and the Belbati princess gives her clothes to the girl as a pledge. Seizing the opportunity, the Kamar girl shoves the princess into the well, revives Lita with some water, pretends to be the princess and marries him.
Later, while hunting with his brothers, Lita stops near the same well and finds a beautiful flower inside. He takes it home, but the false princess cuts off its petals; where the petals land, a bel tree sprouts. Later, Lita's horse rushes off to the new bel tree, and a fruit falls on its saddle. Lita brings the fruit home and opens it, releasing a girl. Lita lets the girl live with them, but the false Princess feigns illness and accuses the new girl of sorcery, wanting to have her killed. Lita fulfills her wishes and delivers the Belbati girl to four Ghasis to be killed. As a last request, the girl asks for her hands and feet to be cut off and placed on the four corners of her grave. It happens thus, and a palace appears.
At the end of the tale, Lita goes on a hunt and stops to rest at the mysterious palace, where two birds are talking to each other about the story of the Belbati Princess, who comes to the palace every six months. The first time, Lita fails to hold her; the next time, he secures her. He marries the true Belbati Princess and punishes the Kamarin girl.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 408, "The Three Oranges". 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.
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. 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". In the second subtype, AaTh 408B, the girl is transformed into a dove by the needle. 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.
In addition, in Indian variants, after a cycle of transformations into a flower and a tree, the false wife orders the fruit maiden's execution. The fruit maiden's body parts then form a palace for her to dwell and two birds that repeat her story to the prince.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. 214.
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.
The Bél-Princess