A Tale of a King (Tulu: Arasu Kate) is an Indian folktale collected from the Tulu Nadu region, in southwestern India. The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children". These tales refer to stories where a girl 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. Many variants of the tale type are registered in India, although they comprise specific cycles in this country.
Sources The tale was originally published as Arasu Kate in 2011, in a compilation of Tulu folktales.
Summary In this tale, in the kingdom of Candrapaṭna, a king named Cākru-Cōkru has two wives (Vajra and Ratna), two courtesans by his side (Enakebūta and Kanakebūta), two horses (Ākrōji and Pakrōji), two elephants (Adānu and Madānu), two dogs (Kāḷu and Boḷḷu), and there are two ponds near his palace, called Kukkaḍi and Kullaḍi. Despite his wealth, the king has no son, nor his pet animals any litter, and the ponds are all dried up, and he laments the situation. He travels afar and a deity approaches him in human form, asking the cause of his woes. The king confides in the stranger and the god produces three magic stones for the monarch to use: one he is to throw into the dried pond to have it fill with water, where he is to wash his hand and feet; then, he is to walk a while through the paddy field and throw the second stone to create a mango tree, and finally to throw the last stone to knock down a mango. The mango is to be given to his two queens, and they shall bear children.
The king does as the god instructed and plucks the mango to give to his wives. Queen Ratna is occupied with her ritual bath, and queen Vajra is told of the fruit's child-bearing properties by the king. Vajra eats the whole fruit and tosses the stone away. Ratna leaves the bath and some maidservants inform her of the king's gift, so she asks them to find the stone, which was in the ground outside. Only Ratna becomes pregnant, and the pre-natal wish-fulfillment is held at the palace. The king leaves for war, but gives Ratna instructions to ring a large bronze drum with pebbles. One day, she feels ill and beats the drum, and the king returns to see her.
After nine months, Ratna is ready to give birth and queen Vajra falsely offers her help in the delivery. Ratna gives birth to twins, a boy with a golden crown and a girl with a golden ornament parting her hair. Queen Vajra takes the children and buries them under a cowdung heap in the cattleshed, and replaces them for a lizard and a skink to trick the king. The monarch receives a letter with the false information. Meanwhile, queen Vajra goes to milk her pet tawny cow and notices it is yielding only half of its normal measure (eight). She spies on the cow and discovers it is nursing the children, so she takes the twins away and tosses them inside a well in a pot. However, a family of eagles is also feeding the children in the well, so the queen decides to cast the children in water in a pot.
A boatman rescues the children from the pot and adopts them. He meets an old woman and takes her in to live with them so she can nurse the children. The pair raise the twins, but eventually die and leave the siblings alone. The children drop out of school and live in the boatman's humble shed. One day, years later, while the female twin is cooking, she welcomes an old woman tenant from the king's palace and tells her their whole story. The old tenant goes back to the palace and comments her visit with queen Vajra. The queen realizes the children are alive and sends the tenant back to the twin's hut to say they are so beautiful, they need a golden palace, which they can find beyond seven seas.
The male twin goes in search of the golden palace and finds it at the confluence of the seven seas, inhabited but demons. The demons tell the boy they can give the palace in exchange for lifting the demons' large cooking rice pot. The boy utters a command for it to shrink, if he was born in Truth and raised in Virtue, and fulfills the request, gaining the palace in return. Next, the tenant women, per queen Vajra's orders, tells the pair to seek a wife for the brother, a maiden called Siṅgi, sister to Nārāyaṇa, the Lord of the Heavens. The boy decides to have Singi as his bride and goes after her. He reaches a large bākimārū field dotted with stones - other people that fell victim to Singi's powers. The boy steps on the field and begins to turn to stone, then calls for her, and her guardian informs her of the stranger seeking her. Singi comes out with a goblet of water and restores the boy.
The boy tells Singi he wishes to marry her, and she says he must ask for her brother's permission up in Heaven, so she conjures up a string ladder and bids him climb it, without thinking either of his sister or of her. The boy begins to climb and up there, begins to worry about his sister, causing the ladder to cut off and him to fall to earth and die. Singi revives him and repeats the warning, but he thinks of Singi while climbing the second time and falls to his death again. Singi revives him a second time, and he obeys her warnings this time, reaching Narayana in Heaven. The boy prostrates before the deity and explains the motive for his visit, and Narayana agrees to let Singi marry the human boy if she consents to it. The god also allows the boy to take gold, jewels and other wealth before going down. The boy climbs down the ladder, spends some time with Singi, then returns with her to the golden palace.
Preparations for the boy and Singi's wedding are arranged and invitations are sent to monarchs and rulers, but the people worry that the boy has no parents to give away the daughter and welcome the daughter-in-law. At the wedding ceremony, the bridegroom knows that his parents are there among the crowd of monarchs, but cannot tell which, so a test is prepared: the boy's mother would have her breasts brimming with milk. However, none of the queens present cannot produce milk, so they question king Cākru-Cōkru, who was invited to the ceremony, if he had any other wife somewhere. They send for the disgraced queen Ratna, demoted to work in the garden, cook horse-gram and eat a little morsel of rice. She is given new clothes and attend the wedding. Once there, a lady presses her breasts: a jet of breastmilk leaves her right breast to enter the boy's mouth and another from the left breast to the girl's, proving their relation. The male twin marries Singi, and king Cākru-Cōkru takes them home. The boy hacks up queen Vajra as her punishment, and lives with Singi, his sister and his mother.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children": three sisters converse among themselves about their plans to marry the king, the youngest promising to bear children with wondrous aspect; the king decides to marry the youngest (or all three), and the youngest bears the wondrous children, who are taken from her and cast in the water by the jealous aunts; years later, the children, after many adventures, reunite the family, which leads to the aunts being punished.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 November 19, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3814480. 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.
Motifs According to Stith Thompson and study of motifs of Indian literature and oral folklore, the tale contains the motif T511, "Conception from eating"; T511.1, "Conception from eating fruit", and specific motif T511.1.3, "Conception from eating mango".Thompson, S., Balys, J. (1958). The oral tales of India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 422.
A motif that appears in the Indian variants is that, in the conclusion of the tale, jets of breastmilk flow from the children's biological mother, the disgraced queen, confirming their blood relation.Schmidt, Sigrid. "Internationale Märchen in Namibia. Bewahren und anpassen". In: Fabula 62, no. 3-4 (2021): 294-295. https://doi.org/10.1515/fabula-2021-0015
Variants
Brother and Sister