Odisha Folk Tale – Sakshigopala – {Ep.196} – Stories From India – Podcast

This story is a folk tale from Odisha set in the village of Sakshigopala about true love, a broken promise, and Lord Vishnu himself as a witness but under a specific Orpheus-like condition

Introduction

Welcome to “Stories From India”. This is a podcast that will take you on a journey through the rich mythology, folklore and history of the Indian subcontinent. I am Narada Muni, the celestial storyteller and the original “time lord”. With my ability to travel through space and time, I can bring you exciting and fascinating stories from the past, the present, and the future. From the epic tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana to the folktales of the Panchatantra to stories of Akbar-Birbal and Tenali Raman, I have a story for every occasion.

The purpose of the stories is neither to pass judgment nor to indoctrinate. My goal is only to share these stories with people who may not have heard them before and to make them more entertaining for those who have.

Today’s Story

First of all, thank you to Rez for suggesting today’s story! Let’s dive right in.

The story begins in a little village. This village is what is today called Sakshigopala. But it wasn’t known by that name, because this story hadn’t happened yet. I’ll just refer to it as “the village”. Which should be okay because there are no other villages in this story so there won’t be confusion.

In that village there lived a young man and a young woman. Let’s call them Ramu and Jyoti. No particular reasons to pick those names other than the vague similarity with Shakespeare’s most famous characters. Because that may give you a sense for how Ramu and Jyoti’s relationship was as well.

They loved each other. But unlike Romeo and Juliet, the divide between Ramu and Jyoti wasn’t that of years of family rivalry. The gap between them was that of economic status, which was incredibly hard to overcome in medieval India. Sometimes Ramu wished he were from a wealhy family like Jyoti’s. Well, not her family specifically – that would make it weird. But an equivalent unrelated rich family. Her dad was the scholar, and a highly sought after one, judging from the constant stream of visitors to his home.

But Ramu and Jyoti would make excuses to meet. Ramu had a minor job in the village’s WMD, or well maintenance department. His job was to retrieve objects from the well. You see people were careless. They kept dropping things in the well, when drawing water. So Ramu’s job was to go into the well and retrieve these lost objects. His official title was “WOLA”. And that’s not a hindi command asking someone to fetch a specific thing. WOLA is an abbreviation. W.O.L.A which stands for Warden of Lost Artifacts. The job didn’t pay much, and demanded 24/7 coverage. But on the flip side, it gave him the opportunity to talk to Jyoti. Jyoti was his regular customer. Her carelessness should have given him pause when choosing her as his soulmate. And in fact, it did make him worry when she was quickly burning through all his customer loyalty cards – you know the type that says that if you pay for three retrievals, the fourth one is free. But as he later found her loss was deliberate, Jyoti had engineered all those incidents just so that she got to talk to Ramu afterwards.

Despite these few moments together – the couple had real reason to worry about their future. Jyoti was sure that each person in her family – father, mother, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, would have a unanimous opinion about her choice of a life partner. And that opinion would be unfavorable. It didn’t matter that Ramu had won the employee of the month award three months in a row. It didn’t matter that he worked harder than all of them put together. All her family would care about was that he wasn’t a scholar like her father.

They brainstormed for a bit what they would do. They were already under a lot of pressure. Some aunts had already started to ask Jyoti’s parents when she was getting married. And in Jyoti’s presence too, like she wasn’t even there!

Finally, one morning, Jyoti showed up at the well brimming with joy. She was so excited she dropped an entire basket of things in the well.

Naturally the retrieval took multiple iterations and that gave Jyoti and Ramu more time to talk.

Guess what, Jyoti said. I know exactly how we can get to a working solution here. I’ve been closely studying the psychology of the individual. 

“Now the plan I have cannot fail! You know how next week Daddy is going on a pilgrimage, you know teerth yatra? And he wants some people from the village to go with him? And how he has organized a raffle for it?”

“Yes, I do and…” Ramu began, but Jyoti quickly shushed him

“Don’t interrupt! Listen. I have been chosen to draw the winning ticket! The ticket will be drawn at the end of tomorrow’s panchayat meeting, after the second advertisement break, and before the birthdays announcement. You know how all the tickets are written on leaves, given this is medieval India?”

“Yes, and…” Ramu said again, but Jyoti shushed him again. So he quietly handed her the next item he retrieved and remained silent

“So, I’ll have my pet goat, Chintu, with me. Because why not? I’ll pick the winning leaf from the pot and read it, but I’ll accidentally feed it to my goat. Then when everyone asks me I can tell them that it had your name on it. No one can verify because Chintu is like a vacuum cleaner – she’ll have digested the leaf before anyone in the audience can even react.”

Ramu thought of correcting her that digesting leaves is not what vacuum cleaners do. And anyway, vacuum cleaners haven’t been invented yet. But Jyoti might shush him again, so kept quiet.

“Well, why aren’t you saying anything? Do you expect me to do all the talking all the time?”

“It sounds brilliant! But maybe another approach is to take this raffle ticket that I purchased yesterday but forgot to drop in the pot. You could hide it in your sleeve, and then pretend to draw it out of the pot”

Jyoti pondered for a moment and said his plan was not without its merits. It had a major disadvantage that Chintu wouldn’t get to make an appearance on stage. But you know what, she was ready to make a sacrifice, just for his sake. Let’s go with his plan. But if it didn’t work, she wouldn’t let him hear the end of it.

As it happened it did work perfectly! No one noticed Jyoti pulling the winning ticket out of her sleeve, and it was a genuine ticket, purchased with GST paid as well. No could poke any holes in it. I mean logical holes. As I said before, because the ticket was made of a leaf, they could of course poke physical holes in it if they wanted.

So Ramu embarked on a journey with Jyoti’s dad and a bunch of other people. It was fortunate that he did, because not long into the journey, Jyoti’s dad took ill. He was running a temperature. 

The other travelers gave him up for dead. This was medieval India after all, and Jyoti’s dad was way past life expectancy.

Well, not all travelers. Ramu was the exception. “We’re not giving up on him!” he protested. After that point, he spent all his energy nursing his future father in law back to health. Which included cold compress changes in the middle of sleepless nights, Bollywood-style.

It worked. It was just a mild fever after all. But again, given the century they were in, everyone thought Ramu had pulled off a miracle! Ramu included.

Jyoti’s dad was so impressed, he promised to Ramu then and there that he would bless Ramu and Jyoti’s marriage.

While Ramu was picking up his jaw from the floor, he managed to croak out a question – how had Jyoti’s dad known about them?

The scholar replied that a little bird had told him.

“But I never tweeted anything about us. In fact twitter hasn’t even been invented yet” protested Ramu.

The scholar then explained that he had noticed that in doing the family finances, he had noticed that his daughter had spent a fair bit of money on retrieving lost objects. And he’d asked around and everyone in the village seemed to know about the couple.

Ramu was thrilled. This is what his mission had been. He had so many plans he had lined up to impress Jyoti’s dad, and now he didn’t need to do any of them. That was good, because he wasn’t looking forward to one of those plans in particular – the one about saving a baby from a room full of snakes inside a burning building.

All was well, until it wasn’t. When they all got back to the village – Ramu observed that suddenly Jyoti’s dad was no longer as chummy as he had been just a few hours before. In fact, he positively had his bouncer escort out Ramu when he tried to come to his house to say hello to Jyoti.

It got worse. When Ramu found a moment to confront Jyoti’s dad, he found out what a cheat the old scholar was. Jyoti’s dad looked puzzled when Ramu reminded him of the promise. “Was there a written agreement? Or a witness?” He challenged the boy.

Yes, there was a witness, Ramu asserted. God was his witness. Specifically, Jyoti’s father had prefixed the promise with “As God is my witness”

“Well then, where is God? I don’t see anyone else here” Jyoti’s father asked, before having the boy ejected from his company again.

Ramu wandered around not knowing what to do. That cheat! No wonder Narada didn’t even bother giving him a name in this episode. But the problem facing him now was how was he going to produce God as witness? He’d heard of God being omnipresent and all that, but then why hadn’t God intervened? And then he remembered – there are millions of Gods in Indian mythology. He needed to pray to a specific one. So he prayed to Vishnu.

And Vishnu appeared!

Now normally this doesn’t happen without hundreds of years of continuous prayer in a cold, isolated place like the Himalayas – just ask most Rishis and they’ll agree.

But this was an exception. There was a major travesty here that needed correction. And Vishnu had been impressed by the boy’s work ethic for a while. That gave Ramu an advantage.

Vishnu said that yeah, he was perfectly willing to come to the witness stand and speak about the promise that Jyoti’s dad had made. There was only one condition, Ramu would lead and Vishnu would follow. Under no circumstances was Ramu to turn back and look at Vishnu.

Ramu didn’t ask why. He just thought that Gods and Goddesses move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. Someone should write that last thought down, maybe make a poem or song out of it.

Ramu agreed and walked towards Jyoti’s house. Initially, he definitely heard the sound of feet. But after a while there was nothing. Had Vishnu been called away by some other urgent matter? How silly would Ramu look if he showed up claiming to have God as his witness, and then he turned around and no one was there? He’d be ejected a third time, and this time it would be final – he knew that.

Ramu was very close to Jyoti’s dad’s house now, and he was walking in the middle of a crowded street. And yet, he didn’t hear any gasps or oohs or aahs from the villagers – which should have been there if they saw Vishnu walking behind him. Unable to resist temptation, he gave in. When he turned, now there were gasps, and oohs and aahs from everyone. Because right where Vishnu should have been there was now an idol. An idol of Vishnu. Everyone shouted that it was a miracle. This idol had appeared out of nowhere.

Jyoti and her whole family came out of their home to hear what all the noise was all about.

Ramu despaired, he had one shot at producing a witness and he had failed. Even if he prayed to Vishnu again, the preserver of the Universe was unlikely to grant him another audience. The chances were certainly low because of Ramu’s failure to follow instruction.

The Panchayat showed up as well. Ramu, between sobs, explained his whole story to them. And that was a good thing, because the Panchayat believed him. Ordinarily they might not have. But in this case, his story was accompanied by the very inexplicable appearance of Vishnu’s idol – straight out of thin air.

The Panchayat compelled Jyoti’s dad to keep his promise. 

That’s all for now

Some notes on the show

So it all worked out well for Ramu in the end. Unlike his counterpart in Greek mythology. You may have heard of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The way it goes is that Orpheus and Eurydice were married and very happy together. But that was short lived, because Orpheus mourned as his wife passed away. Being an accomplished musician, like me, he moved the God of the Underworld, Hades to compassion. That fact alone could have boosted his resume immensely. But Orpheus wasn’t looking for a job. He was looking to get his wife back. Hades agreed to send her back, with a similar condition to the one we saw from Vishnu. Well, guess what Orpheus didn’t hear her footsteps either and just a few steps away from home he turned around. She had been tantalizingly close to returning to the land of the living, but his action sent her back to the underworld. Orpheus’s story was tragic, but Ramu had a happier ending

Sakshigopala also called Sakhigopala is a real town between Puri and Bhubaneswar. This is where you’ll find the temple dedicated to Vishnu. It’s called the Gopinath temple because Gopinath is synonymous with Krishna which was one of Vishnu’s avatars. Legend has it that this is the exact spot where Vishnu turned into a statue. 

We have to thank the boy for his rash action in turning around when he did. If he hadn’t, Vishnu would probably have appeared, borne witness and headed back to his home.

That’s all for now. 

Next Time

In the next episode, we’ll talk about a real historical person in 18th-century Karnataka. This lady, Onake Obbava, is celebrated for her heroics. Especially how she single-handedly resisted a sneak attack from enemy forces that were trying to enter her besieged fort.

Feedback

Thank you all for the comments on Social Media and on Spotify’s Q&A! I can’t directly reply to the questions there, but I’ll address them here on this show.

Thank you to Rez, Vamsi and Libby for the feedback.

Vamsi, thanks for the suggestion about Shikhandi. That will happen soon, now that we’ve introduced both Drupad and we did Amba’s story in Episode 91, we have the grounds to cover Shikhandi’s story too.

Raghu – we had taken a bit of a deviation away from the wax palace too explain Karna, and about the Drupad – Dronacharya fight, but we’ll be getting back to the Pandavas and their escape from it.

Bindu – I’ve noted the story request for the story of Vikram and the Princess of China. We;ll cover it once we’ve gotten through some of these

If you have any other comments or suggestions or if there are particular stories you’d like to hear, please do let me know by leaving a comment or a review on the site sfipodcast.com, or tweet @sfipodcast, or reply to the questions on Spotify Q&A. You can also find me on Instagram and Facebook.

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A big thank you to each of you for your continued support and your feedback.

The music is from Purple Planet.

Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time!