Loving Laili

Beat I — The Dream that Named a Stranger

There was, in the time when north Indian kings still kept court under canopies of coloured silk, a king called Dantál — a name which, in folk-Hindustâní, suggests dant, “tooth,” and a man whose word, like a tooth, did not bend. He had rupees enough to weigh his treasury floor, soldiers enough to ring the parade-ground in a single circle, and one only son, Prince Majnún. The boy had been born with the colouring that Hindustâní storytelling reserves for the marvellous prince of the western frontier — white teeth, red lips, blue eyes, red cheeks, red hair, white skin — the colouring of a Persian miniature dropped accidentally into a Bengali garden. He grew up beside the Wazír’s son Husain Mahámat, and the two of them could not be told apart for affection. They cut mangoes off the king’s trees with little knives, kept a tutor who taught them their alif, be, pé, and grew, as boys in such stories do, into two fine young men ready to ride out and look for game.

So they went hunting, riding through the dust of the dry season into the country of Phaláná — a stock-name in north Indian fairy tale, equivalent in flavour to English “Such-and-such-shire,” meaning an indeterminate neighbouring kingdom on the next river over. The Rájá of Phaláná was called Múnsúk Rájá; he had a daughter, Lailí, brown-eyed and black-haired, the very contrary in her colouring to the prince who would one day marry her, as if folk-narrative wished to make the point that opposites in colour produce equals in love. And of Lailí the tale records something unusual: that some weeks before Majnún’s hunt, while she slept, an angel had come to her in the form of a man and told her that her husband was to be Prince Majnún and no one else. Khudá ká hukm hai, the angel said — it is the command of God.

From that moment Lailí had only one word in her mouth. “Majnún, Majnún; mujhe Majnún cháhiye” — “Majnun, Majnun; I want Majnun.” She said it eating, said it walking, said it half-dreaming. Her father, who had not heard the dream, was vexed; the servants, who had, were silent. And then one afternoon, riding out in the dust to hawá kháná — literally to “eat the air,” the Mughal idiom for taking a pleasure-ride — Lailí saw two strangers in the lanes of her capital, and one of them was the white-skinned, red-haired prince of her dream. That is Majnún; I am sure of it, she told her father. Múnsúk Rájá said yes, my daughter, we will ask him to-morrow. But it was not to be: Majnún had ridden out of the kingdom in the night, and Lailí’s singing of his name turned in a single hour into a wild lament that drove her into the jungle, away from her father’s palace, away from her mother’s embroidered quilts, away from the parakeet-cages of Phaláná. For twelve years she wandered alone, repeating Majnún, Majnún; I want Majnún, in the way that mantras are repeated in the silent caves of Sítas and Mahlanis — not because the speaker hopes to be answered, but because saying the name is the only protection she has left.

Beat II — The Rohú, the Crow, the Jackal, and the Serpent’s Knife

The second movement of the tale is its great river-passage, and one of the loveliest pieces of indigenous water-mythology in the Stokes corpus. After her twelve years of jungle wandering Lailí was met by a fakír — the storyteller pauses to inform us that this fakir was an angel in disguise, but Lailí did not know it — who told her: You will never reach Majnún’s country on foot. When you come to the Bhágírathí, the great branch of the Ganga that flows down through Bengal, you will see a yawning Rohú. Get him to carry you. The Bhágírathí is the upper Ganges; the Rohú (Labeo rohita) is the largest carp of north Indian rivers, sacred enough that Bengali fishermen still tie a thread of red cotton round its tail before cooking. To enter such a fish is to enter the river itself.

Lailí came to the Bhágírathí and found the fish yawning in the shallows; she jumped — head-first, in the version Dunkní gave Stokes — down its throat. Once inside, she did not stop saying Majnún, Majnún. The fish was alarmed. He asked the next traveller who passed for help. A crow came down to perch on his back, said the courteous “Caw, caw,” that the carrion-bird gives by way of greeting in folk Bengali, and offered to fly into his mouth and look. You have a Rák&_shas in your stomach, said the crow, and flew off in a hurry. A jackal came next, leaned his black-tipped muzzle into the fish’s gullet for half a moment, came back wide-eyed, and announced the same; he ran away faster than the crow. Then a great snake — in the Hindustâní folk-bestiary the wisest of the three judges — offered to do better than to look. If you let me cut you open, the serpent said, I have a medicine afterward to make you whole again. The Rohú agreed; the snake produced a knife and slit him from gill to vent; and out, blinking, climbed Lailí.

She had spent twenty-four years between her father’s palace and the Rohú’s belly. Her teeth had fallen out, her hair was white, her hands shook. The serpent kept his promise to the fish (whom he revived with a paste pressed from a green leaf), and then carried Lailí on his back to Majnún’s court. There the old woman cried at the gate, in the only voice she still owned: Majnún, Majnún; I want Majnún. They brought her in. King Majnún — for he had been crowned by then — said: who is this old woman? She told him: I am Lailí, daughter of Múnsúk Rájá. Twenty-four years ago I asked you to marry me, and you rode away in the night. Then she said the line that turns the tale: “Pray to God,” said Lailí, “to make us both young again, and then we shall be married.” Majnún prayed; the answer came down clean as a dropped coin: Touch Lailí’s clothes; they will catch fire; when they have burnt away, she and you will both be young again. He touched. The clothes burnt. They were married amid feasting and rice-throwing, and travelled north to Phaláná to find that her father and mother — whose blindness had been growing during all her absent years — received their sight back the moment Lailí entered their hall. The wedding was held a second time, at the bride’s home, as the village custom required.

Beat III — The Heap of Ashes, the Little White Dog, and the Red Fruit

The third movement of “Loving Lailí” is what makes it more than a folk-comedy of reunion. Folklorists know the pattern as the repeat-loss sequence: a fairy heroine who has just been hard-won is lost again, transformed, and won a third time, and the third winning is the test of the husband’s love that the first two could not be. After the wedding-feasts the prince and Lailí rode out to hawá kháná in a strange country, and Lailí, who already had folk-prophetic instincts, refused to enter a particular jungle. Some harm will happen to me, she said. Majnún laughed at her caution — the second cardinal sin of folk husbands after the first sin of riding away in the night — and pushed his horse into the trees.

God, the storyteller now tells us, was curious. I should like to know how much Prince Majnún loves his wife. Would he be very sorry if she died? Would he marry another wife? I will see. So an angel was sent in the form of a fakir; he threw a powder in Lailí’s face; she became a heap of ashes on the jungle path. Majnún carried the ashes home and grieved for a long, long time, and then, as men do, he began at last to walk again in his father’s garden with Husain Mahámat, and his father, anxious about the succession, urged him to take a new wife. I will only have Lailí, Majnún said. Then I will not have any wife at all.

The angel meanwhile had not let the heap of ashes lie. He cleaned them; he mixed them with clay and water; he made a clay woman of them; God breathed life into her; and Lailí sat up — old, very old, with a long, long nose, teeth like tusks, and the same word in her mouth, Majnún, Majnún; I want Majnún. Eventually the angel petitioned heaven and brought her back to King Dantál’s garden; but he laid on her the test that proves Majnún’s heart. She was to show herself, but not speak, while Majnún walked there. If he was afraid, on the next day she would become a little white dog, and would only regain her human form when the prince — without knowing the dog was Lailí — loved her enough to feed her with his own food and let her sleep in his bed. The pattern is the precise inversion of the better-known European disenchantment by kiss: here the heroine is restored not by recognition but by unrecognised kindness; the love that earns her back is the love that does not even know what it is loving.

Majnún did exactly what the storyteller needed. He saw the old woman in the jungle-grass, took her for a Ráks_has, ran to the palace shouting, refused to walk in the garden again. The next day a pretty little white dog appeared in the same path; the prince, bewildered but unbruised, fell at once into fondness for it; she slept in his bed. And one night the dog turned, in his arms, into the old woman. He cried out in real fear — What do you want? Oh, do not eat me! — and Lailí, weeping, told him exactly who she was, and what had happened, and how the unrecognised kindness was almost done. King Dantál, told the next morning, gave the wisest counsel a folk king has ever given a son: Tell her you will marry her if she can be young again. She will know what to do. That night Lailí said: In two days’ time, walk in the garden. There will be a beautiful red fruit. Bring it to your room. Cut it open alone. I shall be inside, and naked.

Two days later, in the moist heat after the noon rain, the prince and the Wazír’s son saw a great red fruit hanging from a branch where no fruit had been the day before. Majnún picked it; he carried it to his room; his father stood, as instructed, just outside the door; and the prince cut the fruit open with hands shaking from a fear half-superstitious and half-tender. Out stepped Lailí, young again, more beautiful than she had ever been, and the prince fell back fainting. She wound his turban round herself for a sari, and when he came round he said: I see you are Lailí come back to me, but your eyes have grown so wonderfully beautiful that I fainted when I saw them. King Dantál ordered the drums beaten; the musical instruments played; the rice-and-rupee largesse distributed; and a third wedding-feast was celebrated, this time, and only this time, between the bride that the prince truly recognised and the prince who had earned her by the slow rehabilitation of a small white dog.

Beat IV — The Sun-Knife, the Healing Blood, and the Gardens of Chumman Básá

The closing movement of “Loving Lailí” gives the heroine her second great instrument, after the magic of the burning clothes: the folding sun-knife. Some time after the third wedding the couple rode out, with only a groom, into a strange country, and came to a particularly beautiful garden. We must go in, said Majnún. No, said Lailí, who was now folk-wiser than her husband, that is the garden of Chumman Básá, a very wicked man. The name Chumman Básá in Hindustâní punning carries the older sense of the sleazy local strongman who eats other men’s wives, the recurring antagonist of north Indian fairy tale (cf. the wicked Rájás of Steel-Temple’s “Sir Bumblebee Bigtalk” and Day’s “Phakir Chand”). Majnún laughed and went in. Lailí, sitting on her horse, watched Chumman Básá come out of the flowerbeds smiling like a tree-bole-eyed cat, draw his scimitar, and cut off Majnún’s head at one blow.

Lailí sat where she was, on horseback, perfectly composed. Chumman Básá came over to her smiling. I want to take you, he said. You cannot, said Lailí. Yes, I can, said the Rájá. Take me, then, said Lailí. He stepped close, put out his hand to lift her down. She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a tiny knife, only as long as her hand was broad. This knife unfolded itself in one instant till it was such a length — the storyteller’s gesture, in Dunkní’s telling, was to draw her arms apart in front of the listening child — and Lailí made a great sweep of her arm, and Chumman Básá’s head left his shoulders. Mary Stokes, in her notes, identified this expanding blade as the sun-hero’s ray, comparing it to the lengthening weapons of de Gubernatis’ Zoological Mythology; in iconographic terms it is a Pun-Punjabi heroine’s answer to the Persian shamshir-e Sham-baká, the “noon-blade,” the sword that grows in proportion to the danger.

Lailí then dismounted; she went to her husband’s headless body. She made a small cut in her own little finger, on the inside of her left hand — the “wise finger” of the south Indian palm, which Mary Stokes’ note cross-links to Piedmontese, Russian, Romanian, and Eskimo parallels — and from this small cut blood came out which, the tale calmly insists, was healing medicine. She set Majnún’s head back on his shoulders, smeared the wound with the little-finger blood, and Majnún sat up rubbing his eyes. What a delightful sleep I have had! he said. Why, I feel as if I had slept for years. He looked round; he saw Chumman Básá’s body. Bring him to life too, the prince begged, with the misplaced kindness that has always been folk Majnún’s besetting flaw. Lailí argued; she lost the argument; she made him ride away with the groom; she set Chumman Básá’s head back on, smeared a single drop of finger-blood on the seam, and then ran — ran fast enough to outrun the resurrected Rájá, sprang up behind her husband on the horse, and the two of them did not stop until they reached King Dantál’s palace. The king, hearing the story, was horrified for the first hour and grateful for the next. He built them a separate palace inside walls he could control; he forbade his son to ride out alone; and there, the storyteller closes, Lailí was so beautiful that perhaps some one might still kill my son to take her away.

The Moral — عشق در دل بی خود می آید

“इश्क भू से भुलाया नहीं जाता” — I­shq bhúl se bhuláyá nahíṁ játá — “Love is not unlearned by forgetting”
(Hindustâní folk-saying preserved in the bridal-song repertoire of Awadh; in Persian, « عشق آمدنی نیست چنانچه فراموش شود » — “Love is not a thing one comes to, that one might leave it”).

Lailí is one of South Asia’s few great heroines whose virtue is, in a single word, persistence. She does not earn the prince by becoming beautiful, by passing tests, by spinning thread, or by outwitting a stepmother — the four standard female-virtue tracks in Indo-European folktale. She earns him by remembering. The dream she had as a girl in Múnsúk Rájá’s palace is the only fixed point in her cosmology; everything else — her teeth, her hair, her skin, her shape, her caste, her nation — is allowed to dissolve, and does dissolve, while she repeats one sentence: I want Majnún. The Hindustâní storytelling tradition has always reserved a special quiet praise for this kind of hero: the one whose only weapon is a name. The little folding knife and the healing finger-blood, when they finally arrive in the fourth movement, are simply the divine reward for a woman who has been telling the truth in one syllable for a quarter of a century.

The tale’s second moral, less obvious but equally Hindustâní, lies in Majnún’s reckless kindness to Chumman Básá. Three times in the story Majnún disregards his wife’s clear warning — he leaves Phaláná in the night, he insists on the unlucky jungle, he enters the wicked Rájá’s garden, and finally he begs Lailí to revive his murderer. The folk moral is that a husband’s sentimentality, untrained by his wife’s harder eye, is a danger to the household. The Hindustâní phrase Stokes’ older Punjab informants used for this is narí ki ankh, mardon ki kalíjí — “the woman’s eye, the man’s gut” — meaning that good households are run by combining the woman’s sight of the future with the man’s strength of the present. When Majnún insists on his own gut against Lailí’s eye, he loses his head.

Why This Story Has Lasted

“Loving Lailí” has lasted, in the Bengali-Hindustâní ayah repertoire, for at least two reasons that the folklorist’s eye and the grandmother’s ear both confirm. The first is the doubled-name conceit: by giving her hero and heroine the names of the great Persian-Arabic Lailá wa Majnún — the seventh-century poets’ archetype of impossible love — the folk-storyteller plants every listener immediately in a remembered emotional landscape. The Bengali grandmother does not need to explain to a six-year-old what Lailí is feeling; the child has already heard Lailá wa Majnún sung at weddings and at shab-e-yaldá, and the name itself is half the lesson. But then, having borrowed Persian gravity, the story does something quite different from the courtly poem: it lets the lovers grow old, lets the heroine turn into a small white dog, lets her crawl naked from a fruit, lets her cut her finger to pour blood-medicine on her husband’s neck. The poem says love is impossible; the folktale says love is patient enough to outlast a person’s body.

The second reason for its survival is structural: it is a triple-arch bridge of the kind I V. Propp described in the Stokes-Day-Steel corpus. The first arch (the dream & the lost prince) is built on ATU 425C; the second (the Rohú fish, the burning clothes, the little white dog, the red fruit) is built on ATU 408 with a Bengali river substitution; the third (Chumman Básá, the folding knife, the healing finger-blood) is built on ATU 312/K1810.1 with a uniquely Hindustâní female resurrection-magic. Each arch can stand by itself — in some Bengali variants of this tale, only the Rohú episode is told to children, and the rest is forgotten — but in the Stokes recension all three arches stand together, and the bridge they make is one of the strongest in the late-Victorian Indian record.

It is also worth remembering what the tale does not contain. There is no caste-test. There is no dowry. There is no virginity-test. There is no rivalry between sisters. The two great female-villain figures of the Indian fairy-tale corpus — the jealous co-wife and the scheming step-mother — are entirely absent. The danger to the heroine, in every one of the four movements, comes not from another woman but from male inattention or male malice: the prince’s hurried departure, the curious-but-uninformed God who tries Majnún by burning his wife to ashes, the wicked Rájá in his garden. This is unusually clean moral architecture for a Bengali-Hindustâní tale of the 1870s, and it is one reason “Loving Lailí” has stayed alive in feminist retellings of the Stokes corpus down to the work of Sadhana Naithani and Wendy Doniger in our own time. When the grandmothers of Calcutta or Lucknow finish telling it on a winter night, they will sometimes pat the youngest girl on the head and add the small line that the printed versions usually omit: “Beti, nám yaad rakho” — “Daughter, hold the name in mind.”