Why The Fish Laughed

Why The Fish Laughed: A Kashmiri Riddle-Tale of the Vizier’s Clever Daughter

Why The Fish Laughed is one of the most celebrated Kashmiri folk tales ever set down in writing. It was first collected for English readers by the Reverend James Hinton Knowles (1858-1922), a missionary of the Church Missionary Society who lived in Srinagar from 1879 to 1885 and gathered tales directly from Kashmiri Pandits, Muslim weavers, shawl-merchants, and the boatmen and fisherfolk of the Dal and Wular lakes. He published it as Tale XXIV in his foundational Folk-Tales of Kashmir (Trübner & Co., London, 1888), pages 484-490, recorded in the Kashmiri vernacular under the title roughly translatable as “Garas mòtsh phyur” — the laughing fish of the king’s bazar. Four years later, the Australian-born folklorist Joseph Jacobs (1854-1916) chose it for inclusion as Tale XXV of his enduring Indian Fairy Tales (David Nutt, London, 1892), illustrated by John D. Batten, and from there it entered the great anthologies of world folklore. A. K. Ramanujan reprinted a Punjabi-Kashmiri version in Folktales from India (Pantheon, 1991) and confirmed its identity as a Kashmiri Vale variant of an international wisdom-tale. The story is classified by Hans-Jörg Uther as Aarne-Thompson-Uther type ATU 875 “The Clever Farmgirl” combined with ATU 921 “The King and the Peasant’s Son” and ATU 655A “The Strayed Camel and the Clever Deductions,” with Stith Thompson motifs H561.4 (king and clever peasant girl), H583 (clever interpretations), H1054 (riddle of the dumb deer), J1115.4 (clever vizier’s daughter), K1810 (deception by disguise), and N455.3 (king overhears conversation). The folklorist Theodor Benfey discussed the “Kluge Dirne” (Clever Maiden) cycle as far back as his 1859 essay in Ausland, tracing its presence simultaneously in Sanskrit narrative and German peasant tradition; Joseph Jacobs’s notes in 1892 explicitly name the second half of the tale as “the formula of the Clever Lass who guesses riddles” — the same DNA that produced Grimm KHM 94 Die kluge Bauerntochter.

The Setting: Srinagar’s Dal Lake and the Royal Court

The Kashmir of this tale is neither dated nor geographically pinned to a single dynasty, which is itself a clue to its great age. Knowles’s informant — most likely the Pandit pundit Govind Kaul of Rainawari, his constant collaborator — told the story as belonging to “a Maharaja and a Vazir long ago,” the indeterminate idiom of kashir-loka-katha, Kashmiri folk-narrative. The court is Mughal-Kashmiri in furnishing: marble pavilions on the Jhelum, latticed jharokha windows of carved deodar wood, fountains of Shalimar Bagh, the saffron robes of Pandit ministers, the green-and-gold turbans of the king’s vazir, and the floating shikara boats on which the fisherman’s wife brings her morning catch from the Dal. Knowles records that the queen’s window opened on the bazar, where the cry of matsya, matsya (Kashmiri gād, fish) rang out at dawn. The boatwomen of the Dal — the Hanji and Mānjhi caste of Kashmir, whose doonga houseboats still trade vegetables and fish to this day — provided Knowles with several of his other tales, and the texture of those mornings is woven into the opening of Why The Fish Laughed. The vizier’s daughter who at last solves the puzzle is presented as a Kashmiri Brahmin maiden educated by her father in the Nyāya logic and the Subhāṣita proverb tradition, fluent in the riddle-genre that Sanskrit poetics calls prahelikā.

Beat I — The Fishwife at the Palace Window and the Queen’s Foolish Question

Long, long ago in a beautiful kingdom of the Vale of Kashmir, there lived a king and queen whose marble palace overlooked the Jhelum river. The queen, a woman of leisure but slender intellect, particularly relished the silver-scaled fish — dali gād — that the boat-wives of Dal Lake carried up to the bazar each dawn. One sunny morning a fisherman’s wife, her wicker basket dripping water and bright-finned fish leaping inside, came calling beneath the palace lattice in her loud, cheerful boatwoman’s voice, “Fresh fish! Live fish from the lake! Come and see, come and see!” The queen heard the cry through her open jharokha and, charmed by the size of the catch, beckoned the woman up the marble stairs. Ushered into the courtyard, the fishwife bowed low and uncovered her basket. There, thrashing among the smaller fry, was a great fat schizothorax carp, its scales gleaming like rupees. The queen smiled and said, “I shall buy this beauty. But tell me, is this fish a male or a female? My royal physician advises that female fish are tastier for the kitchen, and I shall pay only for a female.”

At these words the great fish, lying half-stunned in the basket, suddenly burst into peals of laughter. Its whole body shook; the water in the basket frothed; the silver scales trembled like little bells. The laughter was a clear, ringing, unmistakable sound, and it filled the courtyard so that every servant in the palace stopped to listen. The queen turned the colour of pomegranate; the fishwife dropped her basket; the palace dogs began to bark. How could a dumb fish laugh? — and at what? The fish, having laughed, lay still again. Trembling, the fishwife took her copper coins, mumbled, “It is a male, your majesty,” and hurried away. But the queen could not banish the strange laughter from her ears, and by the time the king returned from durbar that evening she was fevered with shame and curiosity.

Beat II — The King’s Decree and the Vizier’s Despair

The king listened to his queen’s tale and grew very thoughtful. In Kashmiri folk-belief, an unnatural laughter or a portent in the bazar was held to be a śakuna — a sign that called for explanation, and ill befell any household that ignored it. The king, half-amused and half-disturbed, summoned his chief vazir at dawn and decreed: “Vazir, within six days you shall report to me why that fish laughed in the queen’s basket. Bring me the true reason. Failure shall cost you your head and your estates, by my royal word. Six days. Begin.” The vazir bowed; but as soon as he left the durbar his face went grey as the snow on Mahadev peak. He had never heard of fish that laughed, never read of such a portent in the Niti-shastras, never met a sage who could even guess at it. He returned to his haveli on Maisuma quay and sat upon his marble verandah staring at the river, neither eating nor sleeping. The first day passed; the second day passed; the third day passed. The vazir grew thinner, paler, more silent. By the fourth day his servants whispered that the master would die of grief before the king’s blade reached him.

It was on the morning of the fifth day that the vazir’s daughter — a Pandit girl no more than fifteen, named in some recensions Subhalakshmi and in others Lakshmi-prajñā, taught Sanskrit and Persian by her father since childhood and famed in their quarter for her quick wits — came to him with her morning offering of saffron rice and asked, “Father, why have you not eaten in five days? Your servants weep. Tell your daughter what burdens you, and let me at least share the weight.” At first the vazir would not speak. But she pressed and pressed, and at length he poured out the whole story of the laughing fish and the king’s six-day ultimatum. The girl listened in silence to the end, then folded her hands and said gently, “Father, eat. Take your food and sleep tonight in peace. Tomorrow lend me a horse, an attendant, the dress of a Brahmin youth, and let me ride out before dawn into the country. Six days are not yet spent. I shall bring back the reason of the fish before the seventh sun rises.”

Beat III — The Daughter’s Journey: Six Riddles in Disguise

So before dawn the vazir’s daughter dressed as a young Brahmin scholar, mounted her father’s grey Kashmiri pony, and rode out of Srinagar towards the chinar groves of the Anantnag valley with one elderly Hanji groom for company. The country Knowles describes is the high Vale itself in autumn — saffron fields purple-flowering at Pampore, paddy stubble silver under frost, walnut and mulberry trees, the snow-capped Pir Panjal in the south. As they rode, four strange encounters befell them, and to each the disguised girl made a remark which the elderly groom (a man of the world but no scholar) thought either nonsensical or rude. These four riddling remarks — technically vakroktis, oblique speeches in the rhetorical sense of Kuntaka’s Vakrokti-jīvita — are the riddle-burden of the tale, and Joseph Jacobs’s notes call them “the formula of the Clever Lass.” First, passing a graveyard, she said: “The dead inside are warmer than the living outside.” The groom thought this lunacy; but a wise reader hears: the buried have shrouds; the wandering pilgrim has none. Second, fording a river by a bamboo bridge, she suggested they make the bridge stronger by “putting our staffs across before our feet.” The groom muttered; but she meant: think before you step. Third, passing a field of golden ripe grain whose owner had let cattle stray in, she said: “This crop has already been eaten.” The groom looked at the heavy sheaves and laughed; but she meant: the loan against next harvest is already sold. Fourth, at a village funeral she remarked, “Is the dead man alive or dead?” The groom thought her mocking; but she meant: does he leave sons to keep his name?

That evening they reached the home of an elderly Pandit and were welcomed with traditional Kashmiri hospitality — rogan josh, kahwa tea, walnut bread on a copper thali. The Pandit had a daughter of marriageable age, watching from behind a lattice. When the girl in disguise had retired, the daughter whispered to her father all four riddles she had overheard the “young Brahmin” make on the road. The Pandit explained each one: the dead in the graveyard had shrouds, the living traveller none; the strong staff laid first across the bridge would test it; the field whose harvest was mortgaged in advance was already “eaten;” the man without sons was already “dead” in name though his body still drew breath. The daughter clapped her hands and said, “Father, no man speaks so. That guest is no Brahmin youth but a clever woman in disguise. Send your morning gift up to her, and let me ask her one riddle of my own in farewell.” In the morning, as the disguised girl mounted her pony, the Pandit’s daughter pressed into her hand a tray bearing nine boiled eggs, a small pot of cream, and a tiny earthen cup of red lac. The vazir’s daughter understood the message instantly — nine months pass after marriage; cream is the rich life of the bride; lac is the red pigment of the wedded woman — and she returned the eggs (saying her hen had laid that morning), drank the cream, and slipped the lac into her bag, signalling her own readiness for the marriage that — in some recensions — eventually crowns the tale.

Beat IV — The Solution Before the King: Why The Fish Laughed

The vazir’s daughter rode home on the morning of the sixth day. She washed, dressed in her own saffron silk Pandit attire, and quietly told her father the meaning the laughter had pointed to. That afternoon she accompanied him to the king’s durbar, veiled, and stood behind his shoulder while the king demanded his answer. The vazir, on his daughter’s whispered prompting, bowed low and said: “Sire, the fish laughed because there are men in this very palace, dressed as women, hiding among the queen’s attendants. The fish, being a male itself and conscious in some divine way, laughed at the foolishness of asking for a female fish for the table while a hundred males walked about disguised as women in the inner palace. The fish laughed at the irony, sire.”

The king’s eyes widened. He gave order at once for every member of the queen’s establishment to be tested in the open courtyard. The test, which Knowles records and Jacobs preserves, was a simple one favoured in old Kashmiri proverbs: lotus-buds and ripe walnuts were strewn on the marble floor, and each attendant was told to gather them. Women — accustomed to gathering vegetables in the lap of the sari — gathered them in their dupatta. Men, accustomed to carrying things in their fists, gathered them in their hands. Within minutes a hundred grim-faced palace guards had unmasked nearly a dozen disguised intruders — some, it was whispered, paid spies of a rival court; some, the queen’s lovers in feminine disguise. The king ordered them executed. He turned to the vazir and asked, “Vazir, this is no answer of your own. Whose wisdom did you borrow?” The vazir confessed that his daughter had ridden out, gone in disguise, met the test of riddles in the Pandit’s house, and brought back the truth. The king sent for her. When she stood before him, veil lowered, and he beheld both her wisdom and her beauty, he said in the words Knowles records: “Such wisdom does not belong in a vazir’s small house. She shall be queen of Kashmir.” And so the old foolish queen was set aside, the disguised intruders were punished, the fisherman’s wife was rewarded with a yearly pension, and the vazir’s daughter became queen, ruling the Vale with the same quiet wit that had heard, behind the laughter of a fish, the click of a hundred unmasked impostors.

Moral: Buddhi as Beauty, Wisdom as Sovereignty

The moral of Why The Fish Laughed is a Kashmiri rendering of one of the oldest convictions in Indian thought: that buddhi (intelligence, discrimination) is the highest of human powers, more powerful than youth, beauty, wealth, or birth. The wise woman, even though she begins as the daughter of a vazir on the brink of execution, ends as queen, because the world is governed not by force but by recognition of truth. The Hitopadesha of Narayana (c. 1000 CE), in the opening verse of the Mitralabha book, declares this proposition in a single distich which the tale silently illustrates:

बुद्धिर्यस्य बलं तस्य निर्बुद्धेस्तु कुतो बलम् —
buddhir yasya balaṃ tasya, nirbuddhes tu kuto balam
“Strength belongs to the one who has wisdom; how can the witless have strength?”
— Hitopadesha, Mitralabha 1.30, attributed to Narayana, c. 11th century

The fish that laughed at the queen was, in the end, laughing at all of us — at the human readiness to accept appearances, to ask wrong questions, to mistake clothes for character. The Kashmiri Pandit tradition that produced this tale was steeped in the Nyaya school of logic, where the cardinal sin is the chala, the cavil that mistakes a word for its meaning; and the cardinal virtue is the tarka, the clean thread of inference that walks from the laughter of a fish to the trousers under a sari. The Mundaka Upanishad’s old motto, satyameva jayate — “truth alone triumphs” — could well stand as the sub-title of the tale; for what is unmasked in the courtyard is not merely a dozen disguised men but the whole queen’s establishment of comfortable assumption. And the deeper lesson belongs to the vazir’s daughter: that wisdom, when called upon, must mount a pony and ride out at dawn, must speak in riddles to test the world, and must come home in the evening to save the ones it loves.

Why The Tale Has Lasted

For more than a hundred and thirty-five years Why The Fish Laughed has been printed and reprinted — from Knowles in 1888 and Jacobs in 1892, through Kingscote, Mary Stokes, Mary Frere, A. K. Ramanujan in 1991, the Children’s Book Trust in Delhi, the Amar Chitra Katha series — because it does what the very best folk tales do: it puts an absurd image (a laughing fish) at the very front of the eye, and uses it as the lever to dislodge a serious ethical lesson about disguise, wisdom, and the proper questions to ask of the world. It belongs to the great Eurasian family of Clever-Maiden tales (ATU 875 and 921), and yet it is unmistakably Kashmiri in flavour, in landscape, and in cadence. It rewards the child who reads it for the laughing fish; it rewards the older reader who notices the riddles; and it rewards the scholar who recognises in it the same DNA that produced the Sanskrit Vetala-pancavimsati, the Persian Tutī-nāma, the Mongol Ardzi-Bordzi, the Russian Vasilisa-the-Wise, and Grimm’s clever peasant’s daughter. To read it is to step for an hour into the Vale of Kashmir; to listen to it is to remember that wisdom often arrives in disguise; and to understand it is to know that the silliest question, asked at the wrong moment, can make a fish laugh out loud.

Related Kashmiri and clever-maiden tales: The Snake Woman And King Ali Mardan (Knowles 1888), The Tiger, The Brahman, and The Jackal (Steel-Temple 1894 + Pancatantra), The Jewelled Arrow (Kathasaritsagara), and The Son Of Seven Queens (Punjabi Steel-Temple 1894).

Canonical attribution: Kashmiri folk-tale collected and translated by The Reverend James Hinton Knowles, Church Missionary Society, Srinagar, in Folk-Tales of Kashmir (Trübner & Co., London, 1888), Tale XXIV, pages 484-490. Reprinted by Joseph Jacobs as Tale XXV of Indian Fairy Tales (David Nutt, London, 1892), illustrated by John D. Batten, with notes drawing the parallel to the European “Clever Lass” cycle. Reprinted in Indian children’s editions by Children’s Book Trust, Delhi, and the Amar Chitra Katha series; A. K. Ramanujan, Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages (Pantheon, 1991). Hans-Jörg Uther classification: ATU 875 (The Clever Farmgirl) + ATU 921 (The King and the Peasant’s Son). Stith Thompson motifs: H561.4, H583, J1115.4, K1810, N455.3. Comparative: Theodor Benfey, “Die Kluge Dirne”, Ausland (1859); Grimm KHM 94 Die kluge Bauerntochter; Sanskrit Hitopadesha (Mitralabha 1.30, attributed to Narayana, c. 11th century). The original Kashmiri title was approximately Garas mòtsh phyur — “the laughing fish of the king’s bazar.”