Fables and Parables

FABLES AND PARABLES

MORAL ENTERTAINERS

From time immemorial men and women everywhere have been fascinated by stories narrated to them in their childhood by their grannies or other elders. To cater to children’s inquisitive faculty these stories presented life-like situations sprinkled with fantasy, adventure and the heroics of the main protagonists. In addition, they carried explicit or implicit lessons in wisdom and morality.

Besides some supernatural characters like fairies, demons, gnomes and elves, the stories included animals and birds behaving like human beings with their typical as well as peculiar fads and foibles and actions and reactions.

Various interesting tales, mostly mystical or mythological in form and content, culled from ancient Indian epics and other literature, especially the famous Sanskrit classics, the Panchatantra and the Hitopadesha have entertained umpteen generations of children as well as adults since their inception. Such stories in which the main actors were beasts and birds and which also imparted some valuable moral lessons were classified as fables and parables.

The Panchatantra, meaning five systems or parts, was authored by the renowned sage Pandit Vishnu Sharma around 200 B.C., while the Hitopadesha (good instructions) was written by the astute scholar, Narayan Pandit in about 1300 A.D. The Hitopadesha drew heavily from the Panchatantra.

The Panchatantra comprised five books: on loss of friends; the winning of friends; crows and owls; loss of gains; and ill-conceived actions, whereas the Hitopdesha had four chapters dealing with acquisition of friends and cognate matters. Both the books had beasts and birds as the main characters in their fables, which were written in the story-within-a-story format.

Garbled and spiced versions of these tales went to many foreign countries, at first orally through itinerant mendicants, gypsies and other travellers and later through translations into different languages via Iran, where a Persian version of the Panchatantra first reached. But, thereby hangs a tale.

In about 570 A.D., Emperor Naushervan of Iran (formerly Persia) heard of an Indian “elixir” made from certain rare roots, herbs and leaves, which ensured for human beings a holistically healthy longevity and which could even delude death and revive the dead. He, therefore, sent his chief physician, Borzuy to India to obtain at any cost this magic potion as also its ingredients and the recipe used for its preparation. He gave him enormous funds and gifts and other help.

The Iranian physician scouted for the “elixir” extensively and intensively in India, but failed to find it and was therefore sorely dejected at the sad prospect of returning to his Emperor empty handed. Coincidentally, however, he was led to a saint who explained to him that the “elixir” had been described metaphorically as it was the distinguished book, the Panchatantra and its tales as roots, herbs and leaves, the juices and essence of which, if absorbed intelligently, acted like a veritable elixir for living a long, healthy and successful life. It also put life of crucial knowledge and profound wisdom into those who were almost dead being devoid of sparkling intellectual faculties.

After obtaining the necessary permission, the physician had the book translated into Persian and gave it the title, “Kalia- O- Damna”.When he presented it to his Emperor, the latter was charmed and delighted with its wise and witty contents. The book then reached many other countries through translations of translations with the addition of some twists and turns, both intended and unintended. The book has already been translated and commented upon in more than fifty non-Indian languages.

There is also another interesting story about the origin of the Panchatantra. An Indian king needed to train his three simple-minded sons as competent future rulers. He, therefore, entrusted them to the highly learned octogenarian sage, Vishnu Sharma, who succeeded in equipping them within six months with the requisite knowledge and wisdom. At the very outset, as the princes were apathetic to studies, the ingenious teacher employed the medium of the absorbing Panchatantra tales invested with useful instruction, which makes a man’s life richer, happier and fuller.

The Panchatantra and the Hitopadesha parables as also the Jataka Tales, which relate to the life of Lord Buddha and his previous incarnations, led to adoptions and adaptations or inspired creations of fables in the same mould in several other countries in their own languages with the legendary Aesop emerging as the most prolific fabulist in the West.

Many religious preachers take support of the fables and parables referred to above to keep the audience interest riveted to their discourses.

Interestingly, the idea of stories with animals as central players led to the creation, in the twentieth century, of cartoons and animation films, particularly by Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera with Tom and Jerry. Now, of course there is a plethora of animated cartoon films with a variety of animals as the lead players. With vastly improved technology, some movies even show artificially created animals speaking their dialogues like human beings with their lip movements in sync with the dubbed sound. Such contrived characters now also act along with real human actors as in films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the Stuart Little series.

The story-within-a- story format was also adopted in the book, “The Arabian Nights” aka “The Thousand and One Nights”, which inter alia describes the well-known tales of  Sindbad the Sailor, Alladin’s Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. This world- famous book also has a story about its origin.

A women-hater Sultan used to marry a girl one day and had her killed the next day. When Shehrzad aka Scheherazade, an intelligent young girl married him, she narrated to him deeply interesting stories so skillfully that she would stop at a crucial suspenseful juncture, as the tele-serials do, to arouse his curiosity and continue the story the next night. The Sultan was duly beguiled and thus listened to more stories for nearly a thousand nights. Pleased, he let Shehrzad live as his queen and never again harmed any woman. The stories in this entrancing book too are studded with both direct and indirect lessons.

The time-tested instructions contained in the above- mentioned Indian classics and their foreign counterparts are also valid in our present troubled times, in which trickery, roguery and thuggery are spreading their tentacles, while virtuous and humane conduct is shrinking and withdrawing its limbs like the proverbial tortoise. In such a vicious

environment is it not wise to be on one’s guard against enemies in the guise of friends, just to cite one example?

Mythology in Hindi Cinema

When Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, now better known as Dadasaheb Phalke (1890-1944), the father of Indian cinema, made his and India’s first silent feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), he thereby introduced the genre of mythological cinema in our country. Having been inspired by the English movie, The Life of Christ, which he keenly watched, he decided to bring to the silver screen Indian gods and goddesses and the stories associated with them.
Mythology has been a popular source of entertainment and instruction for Indian masses for millennia as besides the Ramlila and the Krishnalila which have been enacted year after year are numerous religious functions, festivals and rituals rooted in mythology. This keeps the interest of people in mythology interminably alive so that even today many films and teleserials continue to be based on it.
Drama incorporating interesting episodes has repeatedly been drawn from not only great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and the Puranas, but also world’s other literature including the popular Arabic and Persian classics, which too embody magic, supernatural elements or miracles and instances of divine intervention.
The cardinal premise of all such stories, which promote virtuous conduct, has been the triumph of good over evil.
The multi-talented Phalke, who was an artist, architect, photographer, playwright, printer and magician, followed his above mentioned first film with more mythological silent movies like Mohini Bhasmasur (1913), Satyavan Savitri (1914), Lanka Dahan (1917), Shri Krishna Janma (1919), Kalia Mardan (1922) and Bhakta Prahlad (1926) and the only talkie, Gangavataran (1937).
All these movies were replete with awesome spectacular and magical scenes supported by impressive special effects, which Phalke created successfully and which tickled the fancy of his audiences and readily won their enthusiastic approbation.
Following Phalke’s example many other Indian film producing companies also came up with a host of more mythological movies, sourced from the epics, as also many devotional films predicated on the lives of certain God-realised saints. Such movies also depicted surprising preternatural and magical elements-in both the eras of the silent movies and the talkies. Films like Hatim Tai, Sindabad the Sailor, Alladin’s Lamp and Thief of Baghdad too were made showing flying carpets, ‘Sulemani topis’ or vanishing caps, by wearing which a person became invisible and other magical innovations.
Outstanding Hollywood filmmakers who acted as role models for Indian producers and directors too had a tradition of creating films based on epics and Biblical themes right from the start of cinema. They even remade several landmark movies in the 1950s and the 1960s when their guiding axiom was that ‘’A good epic never dies, it just gets remade’’.
In India also many of our successful mythologicals were remade several times. The most popular teleserials- Ramanand Sagar’s 74- episode Ramayana and B R Chopra’s 94-episode Mahabharata, both of which retold anew the stories contained in the eponymous epics and which millions of people watched irresistibly in the late 1980s, are sterling examples of this trend.
In the 1940s when Hindi cinema was at its peak, films depicting with finesse certain episodes from the Ramayana were made. Vijay Bhatt’s Bharat Milap (1942) and Ram Rajya (1943), in both of which Prem Adib and Shobhana Samarth (Kajol’s maternal grandmother) featured as Ram and Sita, were great hits of this type.
In Ram Rajya a group of people celebrating Rama’s return to Ayodhya sing the chorus, ‘’Aaya Ram Rajya’’ with a veiled allusion tol ‘Ram Rajya’’, the term used by Gandhiji for re-establishment of a rightful rule. Incidentally, this was the only film a good part of which Gandhiji saw when he was convalescing in 1945.
Some of the other milestone mythological movies turned out by the Hindi cinema in its nearly a century long journey were Seeta (1934), Gopal Krishna (1938), Sampoorna Ramayan (1961), Jai Santoshi Maa (1975) and Har Har Mahadev (1983). In many mythologicals the former wrestler and muscleman, Dara Singh played the role of Hanuman to the amusement particularly of children as an entertaining and comically inclined superhero. The late character actor, Jeevan too appeared in a large number of films as a ‘’Narayan, Narayan’- chanting Devrishi Narad, who would appear suddenly on a scene and equally speedily disappear.
Miracles extended to films of some other genres such as Tansen (1943), a historical-musical in which leaves sprout and flowers blossom on plants in a garden as Tansen (K L Saigal) sings raga Bahar and again musical instruments in Akbar’s court start playing by themselves as the legendary singer renders a dhrupad. In Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977) two beams of light travel from the eyes of the statue of Sai Baba in the Shirdi Temple to the blinded eyes of a woman (played by Nirupa Rai) and instantly restore her vision.
Audiences anticipate and accept miraculous happenings like restoration of good health of someone terminally ill or return of vision in sightless eyes like in the example cited above. They also wish the virtuous protagonist to receive divine help in a tortuous situation and feel relaved when this actually happens.
The long - prevalent belief of various communities in our country has been that a man’s fate is predetermined by some inscrutable law of the supreme power or God who has created and is running this universe.
The Hindus and followers of other faiths of Indian origin believe in rebirth, and the casting of destiny on the basis of a man’s Karma or good and bad actions done in his previous life or lives. In his new incarnation he is again supposed to be granted some freedom and discretion to act and thereby get either credit or discredit added to his past account, as it were.
Miracles happen and prayers are answered in cinema as in life. Recall the case of Babar, who prayerfully offered to surrender his own life in exchange for his critically ill son, Humayun’s good health.
The scheme, by which such things actually take place, is ineffable and defies analysis. It is, however, generally believed that the all-merciful God relents in exceptional circumstances and bestows a grace or concession on the deserving affected or afflicted person.
While some persons may interpret this by the logic of cause and effect, the believers will devoutly regard it as a gracious grant of a divine boon.

S.H. Manto: Master Story Writer

Widely reputed as one of the best Urdu short story writers of the Indian subcontinent, Saadat Hasan Manto has evoked both admiration and denunciation – admiration for his skilfully weaving interesting though conscious-grazing brief yarns and denunciation for his uninhibited exposure of baser instincts and actions of human beings in their stark nakedness.
Besides twenty-two anthologies of short stories for which he is famous, he authored a novel (Baghair Unwan Ke), a play (Teen Auratein), essays (Manto Ke Mazameen) and the first-hand biographical anecdotes (Meena Bazaar) concerning a number of persons associated with the Hindi film industry, of which he too was a part as a script writer and a scenarist.
During a literary and journalistic career spanning two decades from the mid-1930s to the mid 1950s he also wrote a few open letters to Uncle Sam and the then Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru on political issues as well as a letter to his readers about his art and experiences as an author.
Born on May 11, 1912 at Sambrala in district Ludhiana (India), Saadat was initially educated at Amritsar, where his ancestors of Kashmiri origin had settled a couple of generations ago. Lacking in the right enthusiasm for education, he failed in his matriculation examination with a poor showing, surprisingly in Urdu, which was later to become his principal medium for production of prolific writings. He subsequently dropped out of a college where  also he did not do well as a student.
In the 1920s and the early 1930s Amritsar, where the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre had been perpetrated on peaceful unarmed Indian civilians in 1919, continued to be politically astir and the young Manto as a restless patriot found the nationalistically charged atmosphere acutely exciting.
He was at that time guided by Bari Alig, an erudite historian and a revolutionary who, among other things, introduced him to the Russian and the French literatures and made him successfully translate into Urdu a Victor Hugo classic. Manto also wrote a couple of short stories which were published in a Lahore magazine. In 1934 he studied for a few months at the Aligarh Muslim University and produced a few more stories.
In 1936 Manto arrived in Mumbai where he edited the Urdu film weekly, “Mussawar”. He liked Mumbai immensely as he flourished there enormously until the beginning of 1948 when he migrated to Lahore. Throughout the seven years that he spent in that important city of Pakistan till his death on January 18, 1955, he felt entirely forlorn, suffocated and unhappy.
In that last phase of his life, despite his continued prolific creativity, he experienced extreme poverty and a sharp deterioration in his health triggered by heavy intake of country liquor. He deeply regretted having moved away from his beloved Mumbai to indifferent Lahore. Indeed, for him while Mumbai was sweet, Lahore was bitter.
In Mumbai he scripted films including Kisan Kanya (1937), Apni Nagariya (1940), Naukar (1943), Ghar Ki Shobha (1944) and Eight Days (1946) and wrote stories of Jhumke (1946) and Mirza Ghalib (1954) and dialogues of Chal Chal Re Naujawan (1944) and Shikari (both 1944). In Eight Days, which was directed by the thespian Ashok Kumar himself, though credit for the direction was given to Dattaram Pai, Manto even played a role – that of a Flight Lieutenant Kripa Ram. Controversy persistently pursued and surrounded some of Manto’s writings. The three short stories titled, The Gift”, “A Wet Afternoon” and “Odour” written by him before India’s partition and two captioned “Colder Than Ice” and “The Return” scripted by him afterwards were alleged to be obscene and harmful for public morality for which reason he had to face court trials and the concomitant public censure, but he was eventually acquitted except in one case. These stories, many thought, were indecent with their too explicit scenes and descriptions.
The canvas of his stories mainly covered the intense suffering caused by the partition and in the horrific turmoil following it, the bestiality of the perpetrators of violence and sexual excesses on hapless innocent victims. His Hindu, Sikh and Muslim villains and their victims were men and women without being identified by their respective religions as the writer’s focus was on exposing the immoral, ignoble and inhuman sides of religiously unlabelled human beings.
It has been said that a novel tells a lie to tell a truth. This aphorism is equally true about all the other genres of fiction as well. Manto’s short stories, though using assumed characters and situations, do point to certain harsh truths and realities as they prevail in the world in different circumstances.
From among Manto’s partition-related short stories Toba Tek Singh has been acclaimed as the best. It takes the reader to the lunatic asylum in Lahore where the idea of transfer of its non-Muslim inmates to India and of Muslim lunatics to Pakistan, like the religion-based transfer of other mentally normal population between the two countries, is implemented.
One old lunatic, named Bishan Singh, however, refuses to be moved away and insists upon being retained in his home town Toba Tek Singh. The guards leave this harmless man alone but he later screams once and falls down dead. The story ends with the ironic comment that between the barbedwired borders of India and Pakistan is an unnamed piece of land on which lies Toba Tek Singh! Selected writings of Manto, whom Salman Rushdie described as the “master of modern Indian short story”, have been translated into English and several other languages of the world. He is the most written about Urdu prose writer. In 1987 the British T.V. made a film called Partition, which was based on his works.
Manto composed a prayer addressed to God seeking to be recalled from this world of the mortals. In a confessional vein in the course of thatprayer, he blamed himself for running away from fragrance but chasing filth , for hating the bright sun but preferring dark labyrinths, for evading modesty but being fascinated by the naked and the shameless and for abhorring sweetness but loving bitter fruit.
He also wrote his own epitaph in the words,” In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short story writing . . .Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who between the two is the greater short-story writer: God or he”. He was evidently proud of his wit and the art of creating evocative and impact making short stories.
Manto’s surviving family, however, after due reflection, instead used the following verse of Ghalib, his most favourite Indian poet, as the epitaph on his grave:
“Ya Rab, zamaana mujhko mitaata hai kis liye? / Loh-e-jahaan pe harf-e-mukarar nahin hoon main” ( God, why does time erase my name from the tablet of the living? / I’m not one of the words that is mistakenly written twice and, on detection, removed).