Punjabi Folk Tale – Badshah Gharial {Ep.203} Stories From India – Podcast

Today’s story is a Punjabi folk tale about a girl who married the King of Crocodiles. If you go back on your promise to a magical talking crocodile family, we’ll see bad things happening. But if you do eventually keep your word, you might receive a mansion and heaps of gold.

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 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

The girl looked at the river bank, absolutely terrified. She was surrounded by a large group of Gharials, all with their mouths wide open, grinning a toothy grin. She knew she wouldn’t last a minute under the water. The largest of the gharials approached her, its razor sharp teeth glistening as she cringed back in fear.

Well we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. We’ll get to the suspenseful part and see if the girl managed to survive her encounter with the Gharials. I guess if you’re unfamiliar with the term gharial maybe my intro didn’t feel scary at all. Or maybe it still was if you imagined it to be anything worse than a large crocodile-like creature with extremely sharp teeth. Well, a large crocodile like creature with extremely sharp teeth specially adapted to catch fish describes a Gharial well.

The story begins on only a slightly different note. It begins with a girl, let’s call her Dulhan. She was running at top speed across her father’s farms. “Help, help! There’s a float” she screamed.

The farmer, Besharam, was not impressed. He said that he didn’t know why his daughter needed help from a decorated platform on a truck, typically seen in a carnival. Also he’d just checked his old farmers’ almanac and he was pretty sure there was no plan for a carnival. At least not for a few centuries.

Dulhan caught her breath and clarified that she didn’t mean that kind of a float. She meant float as in a group of crocodiles. Except these weren’t crocodiles, they were Gharials. They were all basking in Besharam’s fields.

Besharam knew he had to do something about it. Those Gharials might completely ruin his crops. And ruin him financially. But first he had something much more important to fix. “Dulhan, how many times have I told you? A group of crocodiles is called a Float, only when it is in the water. When it is on land, you call it a bask! It’s in the name – you said they were basking in the fields”

“And what do you call the group when some are in the water and some are on land? A flask? Or a boat?”

Besharam wasn’t impressed. Dad jokes were supposed to be his domain, he was a little ashamed not to have thought of that himself.

Besharam had decided that some diplomacy was the need of the hour. He would try talking to the Gharials. He certainly didn’t have powerful allies to fight back against encroachment. And when he reached them, he saw they weren’t meaning to trample down on all his crops. They were just playing some kind of a sport. Besharam’s fields seemed to have been converted into a bowling alley for the Gharials. The Reptiles seemed to be a part of a club called the “Alley-gators”. Besharam looked at it and winced. Everyone in this story seemed to be making Dad jokes. Except for the real dad.

He cleared his throat to get one of the Gharials’ attention. No one seemed to pay him any attention. “Excuse me, Mr. Gharial sir” he said to one Gharial who seemed to be their leader. Besharam wasn’t sure. Something in its manner gave him that impression. Or maybe because it was the only one wearing a crown.

The Gharial King, whose name was Raja, turned a lazy glance at him and said “Buddy, you and I have to talk about encroachment”

Before Besharam could say that that was exactly what he had in mind, the Gharial King added that it was not cool for Besharam to stumble in here onto their bowling alley. If he wanted to watch their annual tournament, he should have bought tickets online when they went on sale. Or in the pre-sale exclusive for platinum club cardmembers. 

Besharam explained that this was his field, he had been raising crops here. And if the Gharials kept playing here, they would destroy him financially. Besharam and his lovely daughter would starve. And then who would marry her? For it was a medieval Indian father’s job to worry constantly about how and when to get her married.

Raja thought about that for a while and said that he had a solution that Besharam would love! All he had to do was to arrange his daughter’s marriage with the Gharial King.

Besharam was shocked. What? What did Raja even mean? How was that possible? How could an educated, cultured, civilized person be married to an animal?

The Gharial King shook his head. “That’s harsh, my dear father in law. You can’t call your daughter an animal.”

Well, what could Besharam do? He couldn’t very well force the Gharials out of there. So he gave in. “Deal” he said. Raja nodded in agreement. He blew a whistle and within seconds all the Gharials disappeared into the nearby stream. Including Raja.

Besharam hurried back. He had to quickly do something about this situation before the Gharials came back. All night that night, he kept trying to get a match out of the medieval Indian equivalent of BharatMatrimony. And that medieval Indian equivalent of BharatMatrimony was basically the local gossip club – people with so much time on their hands that they naturally used it to poke their nose into everyone’s business. But it worked. Before dawn, there was a boy who had been arranged to marry Dulhan.

Dulhan woke up the next morning and was shocked. Piles of profiles that her dad had read all night. And what Besharam told her shocked her further. There was someone whom her dad had promised to give her away to, but then decided he would instead have her marry someone else? How’d they get here? What about doing college and MBA and setting up her business and all that she wanted? But I guess living in a patriarchy leaves you with little options.

So she grumbled and complained, but no one paid any attention to her. Her marriage was going to be with this other guy, coincidentally named Dulha. And why wait for the next auspicious day? Besharam said. No time like the present. Let’s just get it done before breakfast. That way we can even save on the costs of hosting a lot of guests.

There was a problem though. The baaraat, or the groom’s procession never arrived. Later it turned out that they were on their way, but a group of Gharials appeared out of nowhere and snapped at the horse that Dulha was riding. Naturally the horse was scared. Unseating the groom hastily, the horse bolted for the high hills. It being presumed that said high hills were Gharial-free. The absence of the horse would have been okay, and the Dulha’s family had arranged for a backup horse, for just such a reason. But the problem was that Dulha had had a bad fall. And ruined his clothes. No way was Dulha going to appear in dirty clothes. Not for his own wedding. So, the wedding would have to be postponed.

“The wedding would have to be called off,” Besharam corrected. Can’t wait for the Gharials to return. So Besharam pulled out his next few backup options.

But it shouldn’t surprise you by now that something or the other kept happening that sabotaged each of those options. There was one prospective groom who slipped on a banana peel and fell into a cauldron of soup. Rumor had it that the peel had come from a banana that a passing Gharial had been munching on. Then there was the one who had an accident while fishing. It really was strange how a tree branch managed to fall exactly on a boat that was far from shore. No stranger than a meteorite from the sky neatly hitting another groom’s little toe and putting him in a cast for weeks.

I’ll give Besharam credit for his perseverance. But there was a point beyond which he could not continue. Because he was rapidly running out of funds. It seemed that the Gharials were going to get what they wanted. And so reluctantly, Besharam made a decision for his daughter, just like he had made every other decision in this story. He reached the part of his fields, now slowly recovering from the Gharials’ bowling tournament. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t recovering anymore. It was destroyed again. Not by a bowling alley but a large tent. The gharials were all there and they were all richly dressed, and the tent was decorated as it might be for a wedding.

When he asked what was going on, he was told that Raja was getting married. But Besharam’s relief was short-lived. He saw his own daughter’s name on the decorations. He wasn’t going to fight it any longer. “Fine, whatever, let’s get this over with” he told the Gharials.

If I don’t have a choice, I might as well enjoy the festivities, he thought to himself. So while his daughter sat on a stage with Raja, and a Gharial priest chanted all kinds of shlokas, Besharam sat back, drank very well, and enjoyed the music. They even had a live band, playing a genre of music that he instantly regretted asking about – because it was croc-and-roll. Although one of the members of the band wasn’t quite up to the mark. Besharam guessed he needed to work on his scales.

He even tried to make polite conversation with some of the other wedding guests. Including one who seemed to be talking exclusively in hieroglyphics. Apparently that Gharial for some reason considered himself an Egyptian Crocodile. A polite relative explained later that that Gharial was just living in Denial/the Nile, making Besharam wince again.

The wedding concluded, and it was time for Dulhan to leave with Raja. She stood at the river bank and looked at her new husband. Dulhan felt it wasn’t as terrible as she had felt in the intro of the story. Let’s get on with it shall we? Do you have a breathing apparatus or something for me? She asked.

Besharam heard his new son-in-law say that she wouldn’t be needing one. After which he could not bear to look. He turned away, and his last sight was of his daughter standing there knee deep in water and all those Gharials crowding around her. Within seconds they had all disappeared.

Besharam had a very terrible time after that. His guilt kept eating away at him. He often went to the river but there wasn’t anything. Until one day – he received a package. It contained bricks. Lego bricks to be specific. He didn’t know what to make of it. He chuckled at finally having made a dad joke after all. When he wasn’t a dad after all.

But there was a letter. Well, just a sentence scrawled on a little piece of paper. “Daddy if you want to see me, just toss this into the river”

If Besharam had been at all involved in his child’s education, he would have recognized Dulhan’s handwriting. But he didn’t. He did take a leap of faith though. And so he approached the river cautiously, took a brick from the package and threw it in. He wasn’t expecting a splash considering the size of the brick, but he got one anyway. And not just a little splash, it was a huge one. The waters parted and divided, and there was a surprisingly dry staircase leading all the way to the bottom. Besharam was astounded. But then he looked at the manufacturer on the bricks. They weren’t Lego, but by someone called “Moses”. As if that was supposed to mean anything. Wrong folklore probably.

Besharam made his way down to the bottom of the stairs, between the huge walls of water. And then, he reached a door in the wall next to him. Politely he rang the doorbell. And a gharial guard appeared. The guard looked at him up and down, and said “whatever you’re selling, we don’t want it”

Besharam tried explaining who he was but all he got was skepticism. “Your daughter married my King? I don’t believe it”

The disappointed father was stumped. He had no idea what to say or do next. He couldn’t try to suddenly sneak past this 20 foot gharial with about 120 razor sharp teeth. Luckily for him though he was heard. Just inside the door was a massive palace. And inside it, and in the tower closest to the door lived Dulhan. She had survived, and what’s more she was breathing perfectly normally without a diving suit. Raja had been right after all, she didn’t need a diving suit underwater.

Dulhan rushed to the door and welcomed her father in. The gharial guard apologized for being so suspicious. In his defense, he was just doing his job.

Dulhan took her father inside but after a lengthy tour of the palace gardens. That was just to give her maids time to hide all her handbags and shoes. You see, those handbags and shoes were made of….well, let’s just say that Crocodiles were avenging how many of their family members had been turned into purses for humans.

Finally when they went in, the table was set for Dinner. Dulhan served the tastiest of fish dishes. And her kitchen staff had laid out the finest crockery, naturally. But there was something else at the table besides just dishes and silverware. At the head of the table sat a handsome man.

Besharam looked on at the handsome man and wished that his daughter had been married to a man as handsome as this instead of to a slimy, scaly reptile. Now if he had kept quiet all would have been well, but he didn’t. He said it out loud. At which point, the handsome man calmly introduced himself as the slimy, scaly, reptile his daughter had married. Also, Raja said that the scaly and reptile was a bit redundant, wasn’t it? Since all reptiles known at that time were scaly.

He went on to explain that there was a curse on him, Beauty and the Beast style. He’d been a little arrogant and a witch turned him into a Gharial. But only when he appeared above the surface of the water. Under water, he was himself. And what’s more he got a few magic powers too.

Including that by just waving his hand he could construct a mansion for his father in law, and give him heaps of gold. Right there, to his right, where there was just the empty river bed before. He could stay here underwater if he wanted. And don’t worry about breathing underwater. In case Besharam hadn’t noticed it, he’d been comfortably breathing without any trouble.

It might be too much to expect if Besharam had actually apologized for his mistakes. But I guess he was just being true to his name. As he prepared to retire to his new mansion and his piles of gold, he did finally think of the right thing to say to his son-in-law. “See you later, alligator”

“After a while, crocodile,” Raja replied.

That’s all for now

Some notes on the show

In keeping with tradition on this show, the names of the characters represent the roles they play.

Besharam means shameless, but can also double for unscrupulous. Because that’s what the farmer tried to do. Dulhan is a hindi word that means Bride.

The story is set in Punjab. And Gharials were observed in the fields near the Indus River. Quite a regular occurrence before close contact with humans drove them towards becoming critically endangered.

Gharial are some of the longest crocodilians alive today. They have about 110 to 120 razor sharp teeth in a narrow snout that is especially adapted to eating fish.

That’s all for now. 

Next Time

In the next episode, we’re back to the Mahabharata. We’ll see what happens when the Pandavas try to stay in a palace that is a massive fire hazard. Well, maybe the obvious red flag was that it was gifted to them by their cousins who had never gifted them anything ever before.

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 for the feedback Poornima, Rez, Vamsi and Samay!

Vamsi – you’re right I do know everything exactly and I can tell you who exactly made the palace. I’ll add that in many texts Vishwakarma refers to a profession. Meaning Mayasura was a Vishwakarma. So I can confidently assert that Lanka was constructed by a Vishwakarma, who may or may not have been the Vishwakarma.

Your other question is pretty good – and yes – Mayasura does appear in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And in that Mayasura is not alone. There are a number of other characters who also appear in both – there’s Jambavan, Agastya, Hanuman, Parshuram and Vibhishana. Not to mention a slew of Gods and Goddesses. And of course Durvasa. Of those you should be least surprised about Durvasa. That rishi shows up to spoil the funnest of parties, and to darken the brightest of moods. We’ll very likely run into more of these overlaps in the future.

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!