Week 12 Reading Diary A: Indian Fairy Tales

 Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912)

Today I'm going to write about one of the Indian Fairy Tales that I might use for my storytelling assignment because I liked it so well. The specific fairy tale I'll write about is The Magic Fiddle, which I liked because it was a nice story and had a surprising twist in that the lady in the fiddle fell in love with the fiddle player and married him. I didn't expect her to be able to come out of the fiddle like this, but I get ahead of myself - here is how the story goes:

Seven brothers, their wives, and their sister all lived together. The wives resented the sister because she did all of the cooking (which I don't understand, I would be extremely pleased if someone else did all of the cooking, but maybe it made the brothers like the sister better than the wives, which really they should anyways because she's their sister and they're supposed to love and protect her). The wives tormented the young girl and made it so that whenever she went to get water she couldn't because it would miss her pitcher or just dry up, so the sister was very distressed. She decided to turn herself into a bamboo to escape them, but one day a yogi decided to cut down the bamboo and make a fiddle out of it. She begged him not to, but he thought someone was playing a trick on him and did it anyways. The fiddle that resulted from this made beautiful music and the brothers heard the music and wanted to buy the fiddle, but the yogi refused. Eventually though, the yogi got drunk and sold the fiddle to the village chief. The chief's son took very good care of the fiddle, so in repayment, the girl would come out of the fiddle while he was away and prepare his meals for him. The chief was really confused by this so he decided to hide one day and see who was making his meals. Alas it was the sister, he caught her, and they fell in love and were married. The sister was very happy and later saw her brothers, who had become poor. She said that that was the repayment they got for knowing about the abuse she suffered for all that time and never doing anything about it.