In this episode, we’re going to do a couple of stories from the Panchatantra.
The Panchatantra is a series of stories written by Vishnu Sharma. It was meant to be an educational guide for a few spoiled rich princes so they could grow up to become good administrators.
Though both stories have to do with a person saving a Tiger from mortal danger, the consequences of rescuing said Tiger were very different in the two stories. So let’s jump in.
Our first story begins with a farmer and his wife in a village in Ancient India. The farmer was not very good at farming. And his wife didn’t know how to either. The farmer had inherited the property but he pretty much ran the farm into the ground. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried planting seeds in the peak of winter, or irrigating his crops with orange juice instead of water. What do I know? I’m just a storyteller, not a farmer.
Anyway their present problem was that they had run out of orange juice. And they had no way to irrigate their crops.
Not managing to harvest any oranges from his farm either, his wife finally decided that enough was enough.
“The kids don’t have a bite to eat!” she said
“Honey, maybe you don’t remember but we had to sell all our goats last year” replied the farmer.
His wife rolled her eyes and said “obviously, I was talking about our very human children and not the baby goats”
The farmer, Bhola had an idea “I know what we can do! Our problem is we’re not receiving enough rain. Maybe what we need is to solve this naturally. We need rain. Let’s buy a lot of Aerosol spray cans and use them. Then we will release a lot of ChloroFluoroCarbons into the atmosphere. There will be a hole in the Ozone layer, glaciers will melt faster, there will be more evaporation and more rain. And then our farm will be well-irrigated!”
“Bhola, you and your silly ideas. I have a much better one. Leave the farm to me. You go do something else. Go to the town, do some manual labor and earn money”
This was not the first time Bhola had heard this from his wife. He finally gave in this time. So he packed what little food he had and started off in the direction of town.
As is usual in the stories on this show, the path to town led through a forest. And as also sometimes happens in these stories, there was a well, right in the middle of the forest.
The middle of a forest is a very questionable location, given how unlikely it is for someone to stumble on it by accident. But there it was, and Bhola did stumble on it. Figuratively, not literally.
Bhola thought he was in luck, he’d been hungry and thirsty for a while. At least he could quench his thirst here. But when he drew closer, he was disappointed. It wasn’t that the well was empty. On the contrary, it was full. But not of water. It was full of creatures. He stared down for a bit and spotted a tiger, a monkey, a snake and a regular human being.
“Help us out!” 4 creatures screamed all at once.
Bhola was surprised. Not that a snake and a monkey and tiger could speak the human language, but that this seemed like a classic setup.
“Wait a minute!” he said “Is this a logic puzzle or something? In which order should I help you out son that you don’t eat each other up?”
“No!” said the monkey “Obviously, if we could have eaten each other we’d have done so already. We’ve been here for days and we’re hungry!”
“And why is a representative set of creatures here? A carnivore, a herbivore, a reptile and a human. There must be a moral in this story” said Bhola
“Yes yes, don’t skip ahead to the end of the story” said the Snake. “Get us out” she said.
“And why shouldn’t I only help the human out? The snake can bite me, the monkey can scratch me, the tiger can eat me”.
But the snake, the tiger and the monkey promised that they would not harm Bhola in any way.
So Bhola found some creepers and let all of the creatures out one by one.
The man said he was Sunaar, a Goldsmith in town. And not just a goldsmith, he was the goldsmith. With an exclusive contract to make all of the gold for the royal family.
He departed, thanking his savior again. He also insisted that when Bhola visited town, he was welcome to stay at Sunaar’s place.
Snake departed next, promising that whenever Bhola needed anything, he only had to think of the Snake and she would appear.
The Monkey departed next, but first he grabbed some fruits from his store in his treehouse and offered them to Bhola.
Bhola, who until then had been disappointed by what he thought were empty promises from Sunaar and the Snake, felt that his luck was now changing. These fruits were more food than he had eaten in the previous week!
And he was right about his trajectory. After the Monkey departed, the Tiger offered him something. It was a golden necklace!
“Where did you pull that from? You don’t have any pockets in that striped orange fur of yours do you?”
“Never you mind, just take it and leave. I found it on the forest floor and it looked shiny and nice. So I kept it.” replied the tiger.
Bhola thought, this was great. All he had to do was to go to town to his new friend Sunaar and sell the golden necklace. Then he would have the capital he needed to invest in his irrigation project. He’d realized he had been doing things wrong all along. Orange juice could not help plants grow. He had to use pineapple juice instead!
But then, on second thoughts his wife would much rather prefer if he invested part of his money into mutual funds, and used the rest to buy food. So that’s what he ultimately decided to do.
On going to Sunaar’s house Bhola promptly asked the goldsmith to buy the necklace from him.
“Sure, let me go take a quick look at it” said Sunaar.
He went inside to his workshop. But it was not a quick look that he took. In fact, he returned a whole hour later. With an army! The King’s army was here to arrest Bhola on a charge of theft.
You see, when Sunaar began examining the necklace, he saw his own trademark. This was a necklace he himself had made! He brought up his records and it didn’t take him long to realize that this was a necklace he had made for the King’s daughter, the Princess. And it was reported stolen, along with the Princess herself. People speculated that she had gotten separated from her companions in the forest and no one had seen her since. Regardless, there was a reward for anyone with any clue at all about the Princess or anything to do with her.
This was Sunaar’s chance. He dashed out the backdoor, leaving Bhola still waiting for him in the waiting room. Sunaar came back with the King’s army. They promptly arrested Bhola and put him in jail. No one cared to hear his side of the story. They stopped listening after the first time he said he had no idea what had happened to the Princess.
In jail and with no hopes of getting out, Bhola suddenly remembered the Snake. No sooner had he thought of her, she showed up. She quickly got the whole story from him. When he was done telling it, she had a plan.
She said it started with her biting the Queen. She whispered further instructions to Bhola and disappeared.
Bhola was skeptical but decided to go with it. The next day there was shocking news. It spread like wildfire so even the jail guards were talking about it.
The queen had been taken ill. She was unconscious. And no doctor could explain what was wrong with her.
That’s my cue, thought Bhola. And then he said to the guards “I know what’s wrong with your Queen. I can make her better”
The guards laughed but didn’t say anything.
Bhola added “well if anything happened to her, I will be sure to let the King know when he visits next that the reason he’s a widower is that two jail guards refused to help when they could’ve saved her life”
“Alright” said one of the guards and channeled the news up his management chain. It ultimately reached the King of course, as everyone in the hierarchy wanted to cover themselves in case it later came about that a cure had been available.
So exactly as planned, Bhola was brought before the Queen. She was still lying down in her bed.
As the Snake had arranged, Bhola tapped the Queen’s right ankle three times. This was the instruction he had received from the Snake. When he did that, the effect of the poison wore off.
The queen sat up in bed and ignoring all the crowd milling around her, calmly ordered her breakfast to be brought to bed.
For having saved the Queen, Bhola at least got to explain to the King his side of the story. That’s all it took. The King understood that Bhold was to blame for his daughter’s disappearance. But he never got closure. Kind of like how they found some parts of the MH370 aircraft, but never really learned what happened to that aircraft.
The King awarded Bhola some money. Not enough for him to retire, but maybe enough for him to try a different small scale business that was not related to agriculture.
Our second story begins in a similar way.
It’s about a man named Saral. Saral was also a farmer who was passing through a forest en route to somewhere else.
When he did, guess what he came across? Not Bhola or Bhola’s well, but a cage! A cage that had a tiger inside it!
As soon as the tiger saw Saral, it begged for him to open the cage.
“I don’t know the combination” said Saral
“It’s a simple bolt, just undo it”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?” asked Saral, but the Tiger simply answered that he had no opposable thumbs.
“Well, Tiger, the real reason I don’t want to open the cage is that you’ll just eat me. You look hungry. And judging by your 5 o’clock shadow you’ve certainly been here at least a whole day without eating.”
“I promise I won’t. You know it worked for Bhola in the previous story. Imagine I might give you a golden necklace too!” said the Tiger
“Which got him in jail” said Saral
“But it did help him in the end,” said the Tiger. “Listen, just do it. You have my word I won’t harm you”
So Saral opened the bolt and let the tiger out. But the moment he did, the tiger began advancing on Saral, licking his lips.
“Stop! You promised” said Saral
“Too late, I’m hungry!” said the Tiger advancing even further
But Saral called a technical timeout and insisted that they consult with an impartial judge whether it was okay for the Tiger to eat Saral.
“I could just eat him and be done” thought the tiger. But then another thought occurred to him. “Maybe he’ll lead me to my next few meals. This impartial judge he spoke of, must be another animal”
So the two found an animal. A bull. They presented the story to the bull and the Bull said, “I worked for my master for years. He fed me then, but then when yeah I was older, he discarded me like a used toy. I have no love for humans, the Tiger should eat Saral.”
They found another creature to judge their case – an old dog. And again, the dog had been ill-treated by his master and promptly voted for the Tiger to eat Saral.
A similar thing happened with the Horse.
Until finally, they met a jackal. The cleverest animal ever. Or so they thought.
This particular specimen seemed to have trouble understanding basic things. He kept saying that he just couldn’t understand what they meant when they said the Tiger was in the cage. What does in the cage mean? Does it mean the tiger was standing on top of the cage? Was the cage on top of the Tiger. I just don’t understand this.
Saral and the Tiger both tried explaining but the Jackal just didn’t get it. Exasperated, the Tiger got into the cage and closed the door. “This is how I was before Saral found me” he said.
At that, the Jackal advanced quickly, bolted the door, somehow despite not having opposable thumbs.
The tiger realized he had been duped. Saral breathed a huge sigh of relief. That was the last time he was saving tigers, either from cages or by contributing to a Project Tiger fund. Whether good or evil, he’d had enough of tigers for one episode.
That’s all for now
Some notes on the show
As usual, the names of the characters represent what they do. Bhola is the Hindi word for innocent. So is Saral, the character from the second story. Sunaar is the Hindi word for Goldsmith.
In the first story, the obvious moral is to not trust humans. Humans cheat. Animals are faithful.
The other more general message here is not to trust someone just because they appear similar to yourself.
The second story has quite the opposite message. It shows that powerful creatures are untrustworthy. Don’t take a chance. Don’t release them from their cages for a vague reward.
Previous Panchatantra episodes are here:
Episode 62 – The Snake That Tipped Well
Episode 48 – Castles in the Air
Episode 29 – Act Now, Think Later
Episode 4 – Hare-y Tales
That’s all for now.
Next Time
In the next episode, we’ll do another folk tale. This one is from the western Indian state of Bengal.