Week 13 Reading Diary B: Khasi Folktales part 2

(tiger from wikipedia)

Now I'm going to write about the next half of the Khasi Folktales and focus on How the Tiger Got His Strength. I chose this story as my favorite because I love learning about tigers as they are my favorite animal and I thought maybe I could retell it for my story this week. Ok so, in the beginning all of the animals were created equal, but this led to some problems as they were always fighting about everything. So the gods got together and decided that to fix this problem they would give specific animals different specific gifts so as to separate them and maybe make them live more harmoniously. So all the animals were gathered and the gifts were handed out. Men got the gifts of beauty and wisdom and tigers got the gifts of craftiness and the ability to walk silently. When the man got home that night though, the mother sent him back to the gods to ask for strength so that they'd be at the top of the food chain. The man did but was told to come back in the morning. The tiger overheard this and because he was so crafty he was able to come up with a plan to get the strength for himself. The next morning, before man was even awake, the tiger sent a messenger to receive the gift for himself. The gods, thinking they were bestowing strength upon man, gave him 12 times the normal strength. Later the man woke up and headed for the gods, but the tiger intercepted him and challenged him, telling him about getting the man's gift. The man dodged the tiger's attack and ran to tell the gods what had happened. They were dismayed but didn't know how to fix it, so they gave man skill with a bow and arrow instead so that he could hunt the tiger.

Week 13 Reading Diary A: Khasi Folktales part 1

(snail)

Today I'm going to write about my favorite of the first half of the Khasi Folktales, The Stag and the Snail. I liked this particular reading because it reminded me of the story of the hair and the turtle in our own folktales. In this folktale, the stag is bragging to the snail that he is much faster and the snail points out that that may be true but at least she isn't all sweaty. Well the snail ends up challenging the stag to a long race to prove herself to the other animals and they set it for the next day. Her family decides to help her win the race when she goes home that night and tells them all about it, so they all split up and go to different parts of the trail and hide. The next day the snail takes off her shell and they start the race, her moving at a slow and steady speed and him moving very quickly. After a time, he stops and looks back but can't see her because of the grass and her being so tiny, but he's sure she hasn't caught up to him, so he calls back to her but heard a voice from right under him cry out "I am here, I am here!" He was so shocked that she had caught up that he takes off running even faster this time, and the next time he stops it happens again. This continued on and by the end of the race the stag was all out of energy from running so fast that he had to stop and rest, and the snail won! The stag was so upset by this that he coughed up his gallbladder and to this day he doesn't have a gallbladder in reminder of the shame of losing to a snail.

Week 12 Extra Reading Diary: Folktales of Bengal

Story source:Folk-Tales of Bengal by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with illustrations by Warwick Goble (1912).

For the extra reading this week I read half of the Folktales of Bengal and focused this reading diary post on one story I found particularly interesting - The Boy Whom Seven Mothers Suckled. This story started out with a king who had seven lovely wives who were childless. He found a way to give them children by feeding them a certain kind of fruit and they all became pregnant. He then met a new wife who was actually a demon. The new wife said that if he really loved her he would have his other wives blinded and killed, so he ordered it done. The executioner blinded them but then took pity on them and hid them away. They started to give birth one by one, but decided to eat the children in order to survive, except for the youngest wife who kept her portion aside. They ate all of the babies except the youngest wife's baby. She tried to save it by giving the other wives her portions of the other babies but they knew she was lying about it because the meat wasn't fresh. She convinced them to save her baby however and they all suckled him until he grew big and strong. Meanwhile, back at the palace, the demon wife was secretly eating all of the staff at the palace and then moved on to eating citizens, so the king had nobody to take care of him. The child came to the palace and volunteered to be his caretaker. The boy became like the child of the two rulers, but he was protecting the king from being eaten by the queen. She decided to send him on an errand for her to her mother to get a special melon to cure her "sickness". When he got there, the woman gave him the melon and let him stay the night. He noticed a peculiar bird in her house and asked her about it. She told him that the bird contained her daughter's soul and if it died, she died. When he left, he took both the melon and the bird and hid it in the palace. The people complained to the king that their fellow citizens were being eaten by a bird and the boy volunteered that he knew where the bird was and could take care of the problem. When he brought out the bird, the queen recognized it and fainted. The boy told everyone that if they tore off the bird's limbs they would find out who had really been eating the people, so he tore off its leg and the queen's leg was also torn off! Then he strangled the bird and both it and the queen died. The boy then told the king that his wives were still alive and that he was their son. The king was very happy to hear this and summoned the wives, whose vision were restored miraculously when they returned. The boy was the heir to the throne then and they all lived happily ever after.

Week 12 Reading Diary B: Indian Fairy Tales

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

Today I'm going to write about the strangest story I read this week in the Indian Fairy Tales, which I liked because it reminded me of Rumplestisken in our own fairy tales. This story was called The Prince and the Fakir.

This story starts out with a king who has no children and is very sad about it, so he goes to lay down in an intersection (was he trying to die?). A Fakir comes along and asks what he is doing so the king explains that he is very depressed because he has no children. The Fakir asks what the king would give to have children and the king says anything. The Fakir says he will let the king have two sons, but that he must later give one of his sons back to the Fakir. The king agrees, but when it comes time to give his son back he is heartbroken by the idea because he loves both of his sons. So instead he tries to trick the Fakir by giving him a slave's son, but the Fakir knows the difference because he hears ants talking about how the king's sons are eating in the cellar and then he is very angry. He demands that the sons show themselves. Then the sons go with the Fakir and I think one of them dies in a vat of oil because it says he's turned into roasted meat. The other one escapes and sets all of the Fakir's prisoners free and takes the Fakir's clothes. While pretending to be the Fakir in another kingdom, he ends up marrying the princess there and eventually reveals his true identity to her father, who is happy that she married a prince and not a Fakir.

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.

Week 11 Reading Diary A: The Buddha Learns Tough Lessons

Myth-Folklore Unit: The Life of Buddha

The Encounters, Laotian temple painting

Today I'm going to write about my favorite episodes in this week's readings, which were about the young Buddha. My favorite part that I might write about in the storytelling was the chapter The First Encounter (and also its sequel, Two More Encounters). When Siddhartha was growing up (Siddhartha was the young Buddha), he decided he wanted to go on a visit outside the kingdom but the king was frightened that he might see something that would cause him to not want to be king anymore and to fulfill the prophecy, so he had all of the streets cleared of beggars and sick and old people so that his son wouldn't see them. Everything that the prince has is bedecked in gold, he is really very spoiled if you think about it so it's a wonder that he didn't turn out a spoiled brat of a prince but instead was a selfless Buddha. The gods were jealous of the happiness of the city so they decided to upset Siddhartha's mind by setting an old man in the road in front of his chariot. The gods also muddled the charioteer's mind so that he answered truthfully Siddhartha's questions about the old man and he then learned about old age and that it would eventually happen to everyone in the world, including him. In the next chapter he decided to go out once more into the city but the gods put a diseased man in his path so he learned all about sickness and how it could happen to anyone, including him. He was greatly affected by the fact that men stay strong and courageous during life even though they are faced with such adversities as old age and possible sickness, so he ended his trip. The king was grieved at what had happened to his son despite his careful planning and punished the charioteer for it, though not too badly. At first he tried to keep Siddhartha more entertained than ever within the palace walls but when that failed he decided to let him go out one more time and once again had the streets cleared of everyone "unsavory." He even changed charioteers. The gods interfered again, however, and made a corpse being carried by four men and grieved by several people so Siddhartha learned all about death. 

Reading Review Week

So far this semester I have liked Narayan's Ramayana the best. I liked it most because it had Thataka's story in it, which is what gave me part of the idea for my storybook. I wasn't as in to Buck's version because it was really hard for me to get past that I'd already read everything that was happening in Narayan's version (except for a few different and expanded stories). I liked that it expanded on things like the beginning and Rama exhiling Sita, but I think that maybe the parts that really overlap should be excluded from the reading. I really liked that we got to read from the myth/folklore untextbook (though I don't have any reading diaries over this because I was having a rough time and didn't do any of my homework for a while, though I did do the readings eventually). I think it would be good to have more of these stories in place of the reading you would take out if you eliminated some of Buck's version or only read Buck's version instead of starting off with Narayan's version (then have a story in the untextbook that told Thataka's story since Buck doesn't tell it).

For the notetaking part, I've found that it works best for me to just pick my favorite part of the reading and do an in depth breakdown of it in my notes so that I can then use that story in my storytelling; so I do use my reading diary in connection with my storytelling assignment. The reading diaries do help me to recall what's been going on in that time period, except when I haven't done them because life was falling apart.

So far, I haven't done much extra reading for my storybook except a few wikipedia pages. I do read a lot for pleasure - it's one of my favorite things to do actually - but this reading is not really what I like to do usually, though it's not boring or anything. This class doesn't really overlap with any of my other classes because classes like literature and history I took ages ago since I'm about to graduate. All that I have left are psychology courses and one biology course.

The only suggestion I have about improving the reading in this class is what I mentioned in the first paragraph: that I'd like the idea of having only one or the other of the Ramayana stories (preferably keep Buck's because it's more detailed) and then having short excerpts from the other book that detail stories that aren't included in the one you keep (like Thataka's story if you kept Buck). In place of this loss, it would be nice to have a lot more required reading in the other things about India that come from the untextbook. I would recommend to new students that they always do the reading at least two days before the post is due (or at least start it) because fifty pages is a lot to cover in one evening of work.

Here is an image from an earlier post. I picked this image because I really enjoyed the story behind it and I liked writing about it in my reading diary and I thought this image really embodied that story well.

Image Source: Wikipedia. Vishnu on Garuda.