The Brahmarakshas and the Hair

In a certain village there lived a very rich landlord who owned several villages. But he was such a miser that no farmer wanted to work his land, and the few who did gave him nothing but trouble. In the end he was so annoyed with them that he left his fields unploughed. His water tanks and his irrigation channels dried up, and he grew poorer every day. Still he would not open his purse and pay his farmers fairly to win their goodwill.

While he was in this mood, a wise holy man, a sanyasi, came to visit him. The landlord poured out his troubles, and the holy man said, “My dear son, I can teach you a magic chant. Repeat it day and night for three months, and on the first day of the fourth month, a Brahmarakshas will appear before you. Make him your servant, and all your small troubles with your farmers will be over. A Brahmarakshas does whatever he is told, and he can do the work of a hundred servants.”

A Brahmarakshas is a huge and powerful spirit, a kind of demon. The landlord threw himself at the holy man’s feet and begged to be taught the chant at once. So the holy man sat facing east and the landlord sat facing west, and the lesson was given. Then the holy man went on his way.

The landlord was delighted. He repeated the chant day and night, and on the first day of the fourth month, there stood the great Brahmarakshas in front of him.

“What do you want from me, sir?” it said. “Why have you been calling me for three months?”

The landlord was terrified by the giant creature and its booming voice, but he managed to say, “I want you to be my servant and do everything I tell you.”

“Agreed,” said the Brahmarakshas, quite politely now, because the tale’s magic obliges him to answer the chant. “But you must always give me work. As soon as one job is done, you must give me the next, and so on. If you ever fail, I will kill you.”

The landlord thought he had enough work for several demons, so he was glad to have such an eager helper. He took him straight to a big tank that had been dry for years. “Dig this tank as deep as two palm trees are tall,” he said, “and mend the bank wherever it is broken.”

“Yes, master,” said the demon humbly, and he set to work.

The tank was two kos long and one kos wide, which is several miles. The landlord thought the job would take months, if not years, and he went home happy to a fine dinner. But in the evening the Brahmarakshas came to tell him that the tank was finished.

The landlord was amazed, and then very afraid. “He did in one day what I thought would take him months or years! If he works this fast, how will I keep him busy? And when I run out of jobs, he’ll kill me!” He began to cry. His wife wiped the tears from his face.

“My dear husband, don’t lose heart,” she said. “Get all the work you can out of him, and then tell me. I will give him something that will keep him busy for a very, very long time, and he will not trouble us again.”

Her husband thought she was talking nonsense. He went with the Brahmarakshas to look at the tank, and sure enough, it was perfect. So he told him to plough all his fields, which stretched over twenty villages. It was done in under an hour. Next he set the demon to dig and plant all his gardens. That was done in the blink of an eye. Now the landlord gave up hope.

“What other work do you have for me?” roared the Brahmarakshas, for he could see that his master had nothing left, and the time was coming when he could eat him up.

“My dear friend,” said the landlord, “my wife says she has a little job for you. Please do it now. I think it is the last thing I can give you, and after that, as we agreed, I must become your dinner.”

Just then his wife came out. In her left hand she held a long hair that she had just pulled from her own head. “Well, Brahmarakshas,” she said, “I have only a very small job for you. Take this hair, make it perfectly straight, and bring it back to me.”

The demon took it calmly and climbed into a pipal tree to work on it. He rolled it again and again along his leg and held it up to look. No, it still curled! Then he remembered that goldsmiths heat their wires in the fire to straighten them. So he went to a fire and held the hair over the flames. Of course it frizzled up at once, with a nasty smell.

The demon was horrified. “What will my master’s wife say when I can’t give her back her hair?” He was so frightened that he ran away, and the landlord and his wife never saw him again.

The 1890 collection links this story to a reported practice of nailing hair to a tree believed to be haunted. This is its folklore explanation, not evidence that trees contain demons or that hair drives them away.

About this telling

This tale comes from Tales of the Sun; or, Folklore of Southern India (1890), collected by Pandit S. M. Natesa Sastri and retold in English with Mrs. Howard Kingscote. In the tales of South India, a Brahmarakshas is a powerful and dangerous spirit, often said to live in old trees.

A tireless demon servant who must always have work, and a clever woman who gives him an impossible task, is a story pattern found in many countries.

Read the original: Natesa Sastri and Mrs. Howard Kingscote, Tales of the Sun (Project Gutenberg #37002)

Reading guidance: For ages 6–8 with an adult. The demon threatens to kill and eat the landlord, but flees and nobody is killed.

A closer reading

The landlord wants to bypass the workers whose fair pay he refuses. The demon supplies the labor, but its speed turns his apparent bargain into an obligation he cannot satisfy. Every completed improvement shortens the time before he must provide another task.

The wife changes the kind of problem. Tanks and fields require enormous quantities of work; preserving and perfectly straightening a single curling hair defeats the demon’s chosen methods. Heating it destroys the thing he has promised to return, so fear of failure sends him away. This is the tale’s impossible-task joke, not a claim that every hair can never be straightened.

The household keeps the improved land, and the ending does not show the landlord paying his workers fairly afterward. His escape is therefore not evidence of reform. The wife’s ingenuity solves his immediate danger while leaving the original labor dispute unresolved.

Try this with the story

Put the demon’s tasks in order and record what success costs the landlord: another urgent order. Compare the final hair task with the others, identifying the requirement the demon overlooks when he burns it. Then propose one action that would demonstrate the landlord had learned to treat workers fairly.

Talk about it

• Why was the landlord so afraid when the demon finished the tank in one day?
• Why was straightening the hair an impossible job?
• Do you think the landlord learned anything from what happened?

More stories like this

• The Beggar And The Five Muffins — another funny tale from Tales of the Sun
• Why Brahma Cannot Eat in the Dark — another South Indian tale where a wife’s quick thinking saves the day
• The Brahman Priest Who Became An Amildar — another tale from Natesa Sastri’s collection