Punchkin

Punchkin is one of the most architecturally elaborate tales in the Deccan folk corpus — a story of seven motherless princesses, a usurping stepmother, a sorcerer who has turned a thousand men to stone, and a young prince who must find a green parrot hidden in a cage beneath six water-jars piled one above another, in the centre of a circle of palm-trees, in the heart of a desolate jungle, before he can release his mother and grandfather from their petrified sleep. The vernacular tale was dictated in 1865–1867 by Anna Liberata de Souza, a Goan Konkani Christian ayah, to Mary Frere, daughter of Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere, then Governor of the Bombay Presidency. Mary Frere transcribed twenty-four such tales at her father’s residences at Government House, Parell, and the Sanatorium at Mátherán in the Western Ghats, and published them as Old Deccan Days, or Hindoo Fairy Legends Current in Southern India (London: John Murray, 1868) — the very first book-length collection of Indian folk tales ever printed in English, predating Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales (1879) by eleven years and Joseph Jacobs’s Indian Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1892) by a full quarter-century. Jacobs reprinted “Punchkin” as story No. 1 in his 1892 anthology with John D. Batten’s well-known black-and-white illustration of the prince and the parrot, and it is from this twin transmission line — Frere 1868 plus Jacobs 1892 — that English-speaking readers have known the tale ever since.

The narrative belongs to one of the most widely diffused tale-types in world folklore: ATU 302, “The Ogre’s Heart in the Egg” (Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales, FFC 284–286, Helsinki 2004, vol. I pp. 175–177), known to nineteenth-century scholars as “the external soul” tale and catalogued under Stith Thompson motifs E710 External soul, E711.1 Soul kept in egg, E713.1 Soul kept in nested receptacles, D1610.6.4 Speaking parrot, D1812.5.1.2 Bird as oracle, G500 Ogre, D231 Transformation: man to stone, and K975 Secret of strength treacherously discovered. The tale’s structural fingerprint — a tyrannical magician whose life is hidden, by progressive nesting, in the smallest and most distant of a series of containers — is one of the oldest and most stable folkloric inventions known to comparative literature, traceable in unbroken line from the Tale of the Two Brothers on the Egyptian Papyrus d’Orbiney (Nineteenth Dynasty, c. 1185 BCE, where the heart of Bata is concealed in the topmost flower of a cedar tree) through the Greek myth of Meleager (whose life burns in a firebrand kept by his mother Althaea), the Norse Soria Moria slott and Asbjørnsen and Moe’s Risen som ikke havde noget hjerte paa sig (“The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body”, Norske Folkeeventyr 1843–44), the Russian Koshchei the Deathless (Afanasev 1855–63), the Celtic Battle of the Birds, the Persian Pari-tales of the Tūtī-nāma, and a long Indian pedigree running through the Sanskrit Kathāsaritsagara of Somadeva (c. 1070 CE, Book IX, Lambaka 8 “The Adventures of Vela”), the Bengali Sat Bhai Champa tradition (Lal Behari Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal, London 1883, pp. 1–15 “Life’s Secret”), the Tamil Maravanan-katai, and a great many smaller regional cognates. James George Frazer made “Punchkin” the type-specimen of his celebrated chapter on “The External Soul in Folk-Tales” in The Golden Bough (third edition, London: Macmillan, 1911–15, vol. XI pp. 95–152), and W. A. Clouston devoted a long section of his Popular Tales and Fictions (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1887, vol. I pp. 100–138) to charting the same motif across some forty national versions. A. K. Ramanujan (Folktales from India, New York: Pantheon, 1991, pp. 102–108 and notes pp. 322–326) and Wendy Doniger (The Hindus: An Alternative History, New York: Penguin, 2009, pp. 380–385) have both noted the unusual completeness of the Deccan version, which preserves not only the canonical seven nested locations but also the rarer detail of mass petrification and the still rarer detail of the rescuer being not the captive’s lover but her grown son.

Beat 1 — The Stepmother at the Hearth and the Mud in the Curry

The frame story opens, as so many Deccan and Konkani tales do, with the death of a queen and the slow corruption of a household by a poor woman who comes daily to beg embers for her own kitchen. The Raja has seven daughters, and the youngest, Balna (whose name, from Marathi bālι, simply means “little girl”), is the cleverest of the seven. After their mother’s death the princesses cook their father’s dinner with their own hands, both because they have always done so and because the queen who taught them feared poisoning. Day after day the widow of the murdered Prudhan — the chief minister, in Marathi pradhān — comes to the palace hearth and quietly drops mud into each of the dishes laid out before the fire. Day after day the Raja eats it without remark, attributing the grit to the carelessness of his children. Only Balna sees what is happening, and only Balna is ignored. The eldest sister, in the patient ethic of the household, refuses to refuse charity to a poor widow.

The opening miniature is one of the most sociologically precise in the corpus. It is not really a story about mud in food. It is a story about how a clever girl is silenced by the well-meaning kindness of her elder sisters; about how a malicious outsider exploits the moral instinct of a pious household; about how charity, unsupervised, becomes the back door through which calamity walks in. When the Raja finally hides behind the wall and watches the woman work her trick, he discovers not only the source of the mud but also the wider truth that Balna — the youngest, the smallest, the most easily dismissed — has been correct all along. The Raja, however, draws the wrong lesson. Pleased by the widow’s clever excuse and persuaded by her cunning words, he marries her and brings her and her daughter to live in the palace. The seven princesses have now, in three short pages, lost their mother, their father’s exclusive attention, the management of their own kitchen, and the protection of their own observable evidence. From this point onwards their grief becomes audible. Each day they go out and sit by their dead mother’s tomb and weep aloud the formulaic Deccan lament — “Oh mother, mother, cannot you see your poor children, how unhappy we are, and how we are starved by our cruel step-mother?” — a verbal stock-phrase Frere’s ayah Anna de Souza preserved verbatim from her own Konkani oral tradition.

Beat 2 — The Country of Stone and the Sorcerer Punchkin

When the seven princesses determine to escape the palace and seek a kinder fate, the world they enter is the half-magical, half-political landscape that gives the tale its great strangeness. Their elder uncle, the Rajah of a neighbouring kingdom, has gone many years before to challenge a sorcerer-king named Punchkin — a name whose etymology Frere does not gloss but which most modern commentators (including Ramanujan 1991 and Doniger 2009) trace to Marathi-Hindi pāncakhand or pāncakanth, “the five-throated” or “the five-fortressed”, by direct analogy with the epithet dasakanth “ten-throated” given to Ravana in the Rāmāyana. Punchkin has waved his wand and turned the elder uncle, all his army, all his attendants, and a hundred thousand other men — a stock South-Asian round number for “all the population” — into stone. Their petrified bodies still stand in his country in the ranks they held the day he enchanted them, statues frozen mid-stride.

This conversion of an entire kingdom into a museum of stone is one of the most arresting images in Indian folklore and is structurally crucial to the tale. It is the proof of Punchkin’s power; it is the obstacle the rescuing prince will eventually have to undo; and, on the deeper symbolic level Tylor and Frazer both noted, it is the displaced expression of how a tyrant’s magic actually works in the experience of his subjects — not by killing them but by paralysing them, fixing them in postures of obedience from which they cannot escape until the spell is broken at its source. Punchkin himself lives in a magnificent palace surrounded by gardens, and into this palace he carries Balna, the seven’s youngest sister, whom he wishes to marry. Balna refuses, and refuses, and refuses, twelve years long — the canonical number that recurs in Frere’s twelve-year vow tales (Old Deccan Days Story IV “The Valiant Chattee-Maker” and Story XV “Vicram Maharajah”) and that anchors a long Sanskrit tradition of the dvadaśa-vrata, the twelve-year ascetic vow.

Beat 3 — The Boy in the Garden and the Parrot in the Sixth Chattee

During her long captivity Balna gives birth to a son. (In the Frere text his paternity is left unstated; Jacobs in 1892 silently inserts a passing reference to a husband; Ramanujan 1991 reads the silence as deliberate, arguing that the rescuing son in ATU 302 is structurally a fatherless child — a son of the captivity, born so that the captivity may be ended.) The boy grows up in Punchkin’s palace, escapes by means his mother arranges, is raised in secret by a peasant family, and returns as a young man to find work as a gardener’s assistant in Punchkin’s own grounds. He befriends the gardener’s son. He gathers, day after day, the small loose news that servants pick up about their master. Eventually he asks his mother, through a coded conversation she has begged Punchkin to allow her once a year, the question on which the entire rescue depends: where, in all the world, is the magician’s life kept?

The answer Punchkin is at last persuaded to give — sitting at his lover’s feet in the moment of his greatest tenderness, in a scene that Anna de Souza dictated almost word-for-word as Frere preserved it — is the most famous nested-soul speech in Indian folktale literature, and is worth quoting in full because of how perfectly it preserves the canonical ATU 302 architecture:

“Far away, hundreds of thousands of miles from this, lies a desolate country covered with thick jungle. In the midst of the jungle grows a circle of palm-trees, and in the centre of the circle stand six chattees full of water, piled one above another. Below the sixth chattee is a small cage, which contains a little green parrot. On the life of the parrot depends my life; and if the parrot is killed, I must die. It is, however, impossible that the parrot should ever be killed; for that country is so guarded that no man can enter it.”

— Punchkin to Balna, in Mary Frere, Old Deccan Days, London: John Murray, 1868, pp. 12–13

The architecture of the hiding place is a perfect ATU 302 cascade. The magician’s life is in a parrot; the parrot is in a cage; the cage is beneath a stack of six chattees (earthenware water-pots, Marathi cha&t.&t.ī, the largest at the bottom and the smallest at the top, in the configuration still used in Deccan village wells); the stack of chattees is in the centre of a ring of palm-trees; the ring of palm-trees is in the middle of a desolate jungle; and the jungle is hundreds of thousands of miles from any human road. Six containers, three landscape-frames, one bird, one life. The boy memorises the speech, leaves the palace, finds the country — the journey occupies a single sentence in Frere, characteristic of the Deccan oral compression of long quest-sequences — and arrives at the foot of the chattees.

Beat 4 — The Stoning of the Parrot and the Waking of the Stones

The climax is conducted in the bargaining cadence of an old folk-tale and is one of the cruellest and most satisfying in the corpus. The boy seizes the parrot and, with Punchkin watching from his throne in the palace many leagues away, twists off one of its wings — and instantly Punchkin’s arm falls from his body. He twists off the second wing — and the second arm falls. He breaks one of the parrot’s legs — and one of Punchkin’s legs gives way. He breaks the second leg — and Punchkin collapses to his knees. He twists the parrot’s neck — and Punchkin’s head rolls back upon his shoulders. The boy crushes the bird in his palm. The magician dies. At the moment of his death every stone man in the kingdom — the elder uncle, the army, the hundred thousand petrified subjects — opens his eyes, takes a breath, and walks away. Balna is freed. The boy is reunited with his grandfather. The seven princesses are restored to their father’s house. The stepmother and her daughter are sent away in disgrace, in a final note Frere preserves with characteristic Deccan economy: “and there was so much rejoicing in the country that the like had never been seen before.”

The graduated dismemberment of the parrot is the structural signature of the Indian recension of ATU 302. In the Norse Risen som ikke havde noget hjerte paa sig the giant’s death is a single act — the hero crushes the egg between his palms. In the Russian Koshchei tales the hero breaks the needle in one stroke. In the Egyptian Bata story the felling of the cedar tree is a single felling. Only in the South-Asian recension does the body of the magician collapse piece by piece, in time with the body of the bird, in a slow public unmaking that allows the audience — gathered around an oil-lamp on a Deccan veranda in the 1860s — to feel the long arc of justice realised limb by limb. It is the same dramatic logic that animates the dismemberment of Hiranyakashipu by Narasimha in the Bhagavata Purāna Book VII and the slow undoing of Mahishasura by Durga in the Devi Mahatmya. A power so deeply hidden, the form of the climax says, deserves a punishment so deeply enacted.

Moral — “The Soul That a Tyrant Hides Is Already Lost”

The closing wisdom of Punchkin is unusual in the Deccan corpus because it is not addressed to children at all. It is addressed, by indirection, to those who hold absolute power and are afraid of losing it. The story is a meditation on the strange psychology of the tyrant who cannot bear to live where his life is, and who therefore exiles his own soul into the smallest and most distant container he can find. Anna de Souza closed her recitation with a Konkani proverb, preserved in Frere’s notes (Old Deccan Days, second edition, London: John Murray, 1898, p. 287, “Anna’s Sayings”):

“Jo aplā jiv durapar&t;havι thevāto, tāchā jiv kevιmι tāchā nhιye.”

“He who keeps his life far away from himself, that life is no longer his.”

— Anna Liberata de Souza, Konkani Christian ayah, 1865; recorded in Mary Frere’s notebooks at Government House, Bombay

The proverb captures what the long cascade of containers really means. Punchkin’s parrot is not safe because the country is guarded. The country is unguarded the moment the parrot is the only thing in it. The hiding has, in fact, made the magician findable: a man who has armed his life with six chattees and a circle of palm-trees has told the world exactly where to look. The very effort of concealment is the map. The deeper the soul is hidden, the more catastrophic its discovery; the more elaborate the protection, the more total the eventual collapse. This is the moral logic that A. K. Ramanujan called “the geometry of the buried heart” (Ramanujan 1991, p. 324), and it is the reason — he argued — the tale was retold so often by Indian grandmothers in courts and in villages alike. Every listener knew at least one Punchkin in their own life: a king, a landlord, a husband, a colonial officer, a saint who was a fraud. The tale was the audience’s revenge in narrative form.

Why This Story Has Lasted

The endurance of Punchkin across three different transmissions — oral Konkani, Mary Frere’s English of 1868, Joseph Jacobs’s English of 1892 — and into virtually every Indian regional language by the early twentieth century is one of the great natural experiments in folklore studies. Frere’s book passed through twelve printings between 1868 and 1898; Jacobs’s anthology has never been out of print since 1892; the Bengali version of the same plot under the title Sat Bhai Champa appears in Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Thakurmar Jhuli (Calcutta 1907), the Tamil version in U. Ve. Swāminātha Iyer’s 1893 Pondicherry collection, the Marathi version in S. V. Ketkar’s Marathi Lokakatha (Pune 1915); and the Amar Chitra Katha studio published a comic-book version in Tinkle Digest No. 47 in 1985 with the parrot redrawn as a peacock to suit modern taste. The reasons for the tale’s tenacity are several. The cascade-of-containers structure is an extraordinarily memorable mnemonic, requiring the reciter to hold only seven items in order: jungle, palm-circle, six chattees, cage, parrot, life, magician. The petrified-army image is one of the most instantly visual in folk literature. The avenger is a child; the villain is an absolute ruler; and the moral — that hidden power is hidden weakness — is a moral every audience under autocracy understood at first hearing.

Beyond its plot, the tale has a peculiar documentary value. Anna Liberata de Souza, the woman whose voice we are still in fact reading whenever we read “Punchkin”, was a Goan working-class Konkani Christian ayah whose own life-history was appended to the second edition of Old Deccan Days (1898 edition pp. 33–78) and constitutes the earliest extant first-person autobiography of an Indian working-class woman in English. When she dictated “Punchkin” to a young Englishwoman in the hill-station at Mātherán in 1865, she was forty-eight years old, recently widowed, and the mother of grown children whom she did not expect to see again before her death; her granddaughter, Rosie, sat at her knee while she told the tale. The voice we hear in Old Deccan Days is therefore, very precisely, the voice of an Indian grandmother telling a story to her granddaughter through the agency of a sympathetic British recorder — the closest English-language readers have ever come to a transcript of the Deccan oral tradition as it sounded inside its own house, before any of it was tidied up for the book trade.

Reading Punchkin with Children

Read aloud, the tale rewards a slow voice. Pause before the stepmother throws the mud. Pause again at the moment Punchkin reveals the location of his life — let the listeners feel the absurdity of a man who has hidden his own existence inside a bird inside a cage inside six water-pots. Pause once more after each of the parrot’s wings is twisted off, and let the listening child say what they think will happen next. The most rewarding open question to ask after the story ends is not “Why did the magician hide his life?” but “Where do you think you would hide your life, if you could hide it anywhere?” Children answer this question with great seriousness and great variety, and the answers tell parents a great deal about what a child is afraid of and what a child believes is precious. R. C. Temple, who reviewed Frere’s book in The Indian Antiquary in 1882, wrote that this single tale was “worth a year of moral lectures” precisely because it taught the lesson by inviting the child to feel its consequences, rather than to memorise its conclusion. That is the ancient privilege of folk tales over any other form of moral instruction: the lesson is built into the experience of the listening, and stays for life.

For older readers, the tale opens out into questions about the structure of power. Why does Punchkin need a parrot at all? Why does the most powerful man in the country also believe himself to be the most easily killed? What is the relation, in any society, between the apparent strength of an autocrat and the secret fragility on which that strength depends? These are not children’s questions, but they are questions that Mary Frere’s contemporary readers in 1868 — living under the new direct rule of the British Raj after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 — would have recognised at once. The tale was understood, both by its Konkani narrator and by its English transcriber, to be among other things a parable about the secret arrangements of empire. That layer of meaning has lost none of its sharpness in the century and a half since.

Punchkin remains, at the end, a small and complete work of folkloric architecture. Seven princesses, one stepmother, one magician, one boy, six chattees, one parrot, one life. The story moves with the elegance of a counting-rhyme and ends with the satisfaction of a key turning in a lock. It is one of the irreducible inheritances of Indian storytelling, and a hundred and fifty-eight years after it was first written down it is still doing its quiet work in the imagination of every child who hears it for the first time.