A History of Indian Literature v3.c35.s12.4

v3.c35.s12.4

When one reads the court-epics, in which the same old narrative materials are repeated again and again and the dramas, that, with a few exceptions, contain the same themes over and again, with which we have already become familiar in the epic, whilst in the comedies the same intrigues are repeated with minor deviations according to certain pattern, one could be led to believe easily that Indians lacked in creative genious as such. What a great difference in narrative literature! What an inexhaustible phantasy in creating wonderful intricacies in stories! How much of spirit and wit in respect of inventing sober and comic scenes in the fable: what an abundance of increasing new materials in stories, novels and fictions¹! Unlike other types of Indian poetical works, in this narrative literature the tendency is not to delineate only the stereotyped figures, but we meet here quite often several types of people—in fables men in the guise of animals—that exhibit a distinct physiognomy. And these men are not only virtuous kings or bold warriors, or beautiful and loving princesses and venerable priests, as in the epics and mostly in dramas too, but also people from other spheres of life, viz farmers, manual workers, salesmen, artisans, and all sorts of people like jugglers, swindlers, rascals, selfish Brāhmaṇas, hypocrite monks, harlots and procuresses. Lastly, no branch of Indian ornate poetry has exercised so great an influence on foreign literatures and has become so much important for world literature as the narrative literature. It is most wonderful that the Indian narrative material has passed from nation to nation in such a way that we find in almost all the countries of Europe and Asia and even among those of Africa, stories and tales of which the original home was in India. And the fact is that not only have individual stories, per hazard, found their way from India into other countries through oral transmission by traders and tourists, but the entire bulk of Indian books, as we shall see, have through translations become common to the people of different countries. For a long time it was generally believed that India was the birth place of all tales. But with advancement of our knowledge of folklore and ethnology this theory has been completely exploded. But the fact still remains that many tales of different nations have had their original home in India.