Why Brahmans Cannot Eat in the Dark

An old collection of South Indian stories describes a custom among Brahman families: if the lamp went out during supper, they stopped eating. The collection offers these two tales to explain it. They are folktale explanations, not a rule followed by every family or a description of present-day practice.

In a certain village there lived a Brahman who had an only daughter. She had studied Sanskrit deeply, and she was very beautiful. Her father found her a husband who was just as learned as she was. The engagement had taken place, and the lucky hour for the wedding had been fixed for that very night.

That evening the bridegroom went to a pond to say his evening prayers. The pond was full of crocodiles, and the villagers never went near it, but the young man was a stranger in the village, and no one was there to warn him. As soon as he stepped into the water, a crocodile seized him by the leg and began to drag him under.

The poor young man was terrified. On the very night of his wedding, a crocodile was going to eat him for dinner! He spoke to it humbly. “Friend crocodile, listen to me before you decide. Tonight a bride is waiting for me, the only daughter of an old Brahman. If you eat me now, I will never see her or her father or my family again, and their hearts may break when they hear I died on my wedding day. They may all curse you. But if you let me go now, I will go home, tell my wife and the others what has happened, say goodbye, and come back to be your supper later tonight. Until then, please let me go.”

The crocodile was very fond of eating people, and it was starving. But it agreed to spare him for a few hours. First it made him swear, again and again, that he would come back as he had promised. Then it slid back into the water.

The young man went home with all his happiness gone. How could he be happy after making such a promise? But so as not to upset his wife’s elderly parents, he went through the whole wedding ceremony. When it was over, he believed he had only a little time left to live. In a few words he told his bride what had happened and asked her to let him go.

She showed no sign of grief. She spoke to him about the power of fate, and told him that he must face whatever was written for him. Then she willingly gave him leave to go. He went back to the pond even earlier than he had promised and called the crocodile, which came up and seized him.

At that very moment, a light flashed in front of the crocodile’s eyes and vanished. It was the bride. Without her husband knowing, she had followed him, carrying a lit lamp hidden inside a pot. Just as the crocodile’s teeth closed on her husband’s leg, she pulled out the lamp, flashed it in front of the crocodile’s eyes, and blew it out.

Her trick worked. The crocodile let go of the young man. “You had better go,” it said. “I will never touch you now, because the lamp went out just as I began my meal.”

The husband was amazed at his wife’s cleverness, and even more amazed that an unreasoning animal kept such a rule so faithfully. And from that day it was settled that people, who are so much more reasonable than crocodiles, should never eat when the lamp goes out.

Here is the second story. In a faraway village there lived a poor woman who worked from morning till night in other people’s houses. Each evening she came home to her hut with two measures of rice, enough to feed ten ordinary people. She was so poor that she never kept a lamp. She cooked in the dark, with only the glow of the fire to see by, and by the time she sat down to eat, even the fire had faded, so she ate in darkness. Every day she cooked all of her rice, but she was never full. She was always hungry.

Her younger sister was a little better off, and one day she came to visit. The younger sister always had a lamp, and she asked her sister to buy some oil that night and light one. The elder sister had to agree, so she traded some of her rice for oil. All the way home she worried. If two whole measures were not enough for her alone, how could less than that feed two?

For the first time ever, a lamp was lit in her house, and she cooked the rice that was left. The younger sister was surprised to see her cooking so much for two people. Two banana leaves were laid out as plates, and the sisters sat down to supper. They had eaten less than a quarter of the rice in the pot when they were both full.

The younger sister laughed at her. “I don’t know what magic you have,” said the elder sister. “Every day I cook two measures of rice and go hungry all night. Tonight a quarter of a smaller pot has filled us both. Please tell me why.”

The younger sister was very clever, and she wanted to find out. The next day she asked if they could eat their meal without the lamp. When they sat down in the dark, instead of eating, she reached out her hand and grabbed hold of a lock of hair. “Light the lamp, quickly!” she cried. When the lamp was lit, there sat a demon right beside them.

They asked him what he was doing there. He told them that he always visited anyone who ate without a lamp, and he gobbled down their food so fast that they never got a single bite.

The elder sister understood what had been happening in the story. From then on she always lit a lamp, the demon stopped coming, and she had plenty to eat with some to spare. That is why people say that when the lamp goes out, demons come to eat from our plates, and why it was the custom to get up from the meal if the light was ever blown out.

Where this story comes from

These two stories come from Tales of the Sun; or, Folklore of Southern India (1890), by Pandit S. M. Natesa Sastri and Mrs. Howard Kingscote. Sastri explains that the custom of leaving one’s food if the lamp went out at supper was once common among Brahman families in South India, and that these tales were told to explain it.

In the original, time is counted in ghatikas, an old Indian measure of about twenty-four minutes. The wedding hour was the tenth ghatika of the night, and the bridegroom promised to return at the fifteenth.

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

Reading guidance: shared reading for children comfortable with peril. A crocodile threatens to eat a bridegroom, and a demon secretly takes a hungry woman’s food.

Two explanations, two kinds of cleverness

The first tale makes a rule save a life: the bride knows that the crocodile will stop eating when a light goes out. The second makes light expose a hidden cause: the younger sister compares two meals and then discovers the demon. The lamp moves from being a signal that changes behaviour to being a tool that reveals what is happening.

There is a playful circularity in the crocodile story. The animal already follows the custom which its encounter supposedly explains. That is a clue to read these as imaginative explanations of a practice, rather than evidence of how it historically began. The poor woman’s hunger is also a supernatural plot device, not proof that poverty results from a failure to keep a ritual.

Make a two-column list headed ‘the bride’ and ‘the younger sister.’ What does each woman know, what does she test, and what does the lamp change? Which problem needs a trick, and which needs an investigation?

Talk about it

• How did the bride save her husband without telling him her plan?
• Why was the poor sister always hungry?
• How did the younger sister find out about the demon?

More stories like this

• The Brahmarakshas And The Hair — another South Indian tale where a clever wife beats a demon
• The Beggar And The Five Muffins — another tale from Tales of the Sun
• The Jackal And The Crocodile — another story of escaping a crocodile’s jaws