Misogynist baggage in Nepali fairy tales

Abstract

This article examines four popular Nepali fairy tales—’The Story of Sumnima’, ‘Sunkeshari Maiya’, ‘Raja Mansarko Katha’, and ‘Hai Rani Chandani’, collected from different written sources—and demonstrates how they perpetuate gender stereotypes and limit women to inferior roles and negative conduct. The study is a critical discourse analysis with a special focus on gender relations among characters. It derives its theoretical lens from feminist theorists like Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous and Cora Kaplan, and gender theorists like Judith Butler. Either origin myths or social and familial tales analyzed in this article relegate the female characters to a stock of voiceless individuals without agency, and limit them to minor domestic chores, or portray them as wicked agents that cause tragedies to their close associates, families, or members of the society. The tales reproduce misogynist baggage and represent a social psychology shaped by patriarchal tradition. The study concludes that characterization in these tales is informed by the value system of the patriarchal society where these tales exist and thus recapitulate gender bias.

Keywords:

• Fairy tales
• gender stereotypes
• misogyny
• discourse
• gender discrimination

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Oliver Nyambi, English, University of the Free State, South Africa

SUBJECTS:

• Cultural Studies; Language & Linguistics; Literature

Introduction

The term ‘fairy tale’ has Latin and other European linguistic roots, coming from Latin ‘fatum’ meaning, ‘to enchant’, French ‘fee’ or ‘feerie’, meaning ‘illusion’, Italian ‘fata’ meaning ‘a winged human’. In old French romance, ‘fee’ was a ‘woman skilled in magic’ (Kready, 2010). The definition suggests that the term ‘fairy’ has a semantic affinity with enchantment and illusion, and therefore, the primary function of the first fairy tale is just to enrapture. This outlook has changed in the recent decades when scholars have also started viewing fairy tales as discursive. This changed view is also reflected in Zipes’ claim who says, fairy tales ‘unite the people of a community and help bridge a gap in their understanding of social problems’ (p. 6). Understanding gender relations through the study of fairy tales is one new possibility these changed discourses have opened. Fairy tales, often mistaken to be pure fantasies or children’s literature, are actually ‘meant for adult readership’, (Schoberová, 2006), and they oftentimes carry an ‘ideological baggage’ (Funke, 2004). Scholars of folk narratives like Farrer (1975) and Radner (1993) believe that fairy tales are historically determined, and their content grows out of the ‘surrounding culture’ (Bottingheimer, 1989). If this ‘surrounding culture’ is patriarchal, its resultant fairy tales are obviously uneven in gender treatment. Gonzalez (1999) claims that fairy tales have cultural and even gender connotations: ‘Indeed, fairy tales voice the culture’s most cherished convictions about the forms that both male and female subjectivity should adopt as they become inserted within a given social structure. They further illustrate how modern power is subtly and cynically wielded on individual behavior’ (p. 10). Reiss (1996) observes how ‘[t]oday, fairy tales are usually told in order to indoctrinate children with special values’ (p. 15). Understandably, the ‘special values’ here also include gender roles traditionally championed by a society.

The Nepali fairy tales are parts of an Asian social tradition that froze into a patriarchal set-up as early as 1000 BC (Thakaran & Thakaran, 1975). As the tradition of sidelining the females continues to contemporary days, Nepali women have been ‘homogenized and stereotyped in order to form a single, manageable idea of female oppression’ (Cramer, 2007). This paper examines four Nepali mainstream fairy tales and shows how the women characters in these tales are deprived of any agency even in matters as personal as their own body parts and marriage decisions, and are depicted as weak, voiceless, or as sources of evil and destruction.

With the development of cultural studies in the decades following the Second Word War, the tendency of analyzing fairy tales as innocent, moralizing and entertaining genres has moved beyond such traditional schematics, and has started taking political connotations. Scholars like Jack Zipes view such tales as expressions rooted in bourgeois imaginations and thus dotted with ideological and political designs. Zipes (1975) claims that ‘[t]he bourgeois writers industriously produced didactic tales which preached how one was to conduct oneself in conformity with the laws of one’s social class and state’ (p. 30). One of such ‘laws’ is the gender discipline along which boys and girls are expected to behave.

Fairy tales not only indoctrinate readers with ideological values but also inspire resistance and reform. Many critics believe that fairy tales do not just change outlook; they inspire actions as well. The ‘politically correct’ fairy tales can help children grow into adults who can be instrumental in wiping out the inequalities prevalent in the society. Gender discrimination can be one of such inequalities fairy tales aspire to wipe out. As for example, Lurie (1970) underscores the significance of fairy tales in developing a sense of women’s liberation among children: ‘To prepare children for women’s liberation, therefore, and to protect them against Future Shock, you had better buy at least one collection of fairy tales’ (p. 42). In another review, Lurie (1971) adds, ‘Folk tales recorded in the field by scholars are full of everything Lang leaves out: sex, death, low humor, and female initiative’ (p. 6).

Thus, fairy tales are no longer innocent literature for entertainment and moral tutoring of children. They are also informed with discursive connotations, including gender bias. In order to demonstrate such bias, this paper analyzes four popular Nepali fairy tales ‘The Story of Sumnima’, ‘Sunkeshari Maiya’, ‘Raja Mansarko Katha’, and ‘Hai Rani Chandani’ that are in public memory since time immemorial. They have been collected from different written sources for the purpose of this study. The study demonstrates how these tales perpetuate gender stereotypes and limit women to inferior roles and negative representation.

This study derives its theoretical lens from feminist theorists like Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous and Cora Kaplan, and gender theorists like Judith Butler. With the rise of feminism, tendencies to locate gender in culture, and not in nature has gained ground. Lorber (1994) says, ‘Gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life’ (p. 1). She points at social processes as factors that determine gender:

Gender inequality – the devaluation of ‘women’ and the social domination of ‘men’ – has social functions and a social history. It is not the result of sex, procreation, physiology, anatomy, hormones, or genetic predispositions. It is produced and maintained by identifiable social processes and built into the general social structure and individual identities deliberately and purposefully. (p. 11)

Lorber’s claims build on the ideas developed by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 that claimed that humanity is ‘male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him: she is not regarded as autonomous being’ (p. 282). The autonomy she talks about entails, besides other things, a freedom of decision and taste. The idea sets an atmosphere for critically scrutinizing the construction of gender, and the discriminatory provisions of defining males and females. Beauvoir (2004) claims: ‘In proving woman’s inferiority, the anti-feminists…began to draw not only upon religion, philosophy, and theology, as before, but also upon science of biology, experimental psychology, etc.’ (pp. 284–285). The result is that stereotypes created about men and women crept into the general social system and perpetuated, much to the detriment of the women. Cixous & Clement (1975) point at the social system that becomes the instrument for gender discrimination: ‘The life of everyone placed in the status ‘woman’ is ‘night to his day’ that has forever been the fantasy. Black to his white. Shut out of his system’s space, she is the repressed that ensures the system’s functioning’ (p. 67)

As fairy tales emerge out of the social fabric, many of them recapitulate the uneven gender constructions. These constructions operate through actions, and norms are translated into roles in a functional way, making gender a performance. Deutsch (2007) observes that ‘gender is not something we are, but something we do. Gender must be continually socially reconstructed in light of ‘normative conceptions’ of men and women. People act with the awareness that they will be judged according to what is deemed appropriate feminine or masculine behavior’ (p. 106). Kaplan (2004) locates the root of such discrimination in language: ‘Through the acquisition of language, we become human and social beings: the words we speak situate us in our gender and class’ (p. 287). She further says, ‘Women are made to believe the abstract identification ‘woman = silence and the complementary imaging of women’s speech as whispered, sub-vocal, the mere escape of trapped air…shhhhhh’ (p. 288).

Social norms have perpetuated silencing of women, and across ages, males have been an agentic gender, and the females a docile one. The female’s silence is deliberately imposed, and Cixous (2004) sees a fear of revolution, if the woman is allowed voice. ‘[Woman] has never had her turn to speak—this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’ (pp. 294–295, emphasis original). By denying speech and voice to a woman, the society has denied a woman a ‘shattering entry into history’ by all means that are ‘based on her suppression’ (Cixous, 2004, p. 296). Cixous is quite categorical in asserting that ‘sexual opposition, which has always worked for man’s profit… too, to his laws, is only a historical-cultural limit’ (p. 299). To Butler (2004), such historical-cultural limits hinge around politics, through which power, including that of language, constructs and perpetuates discriminatory gender treatments: ‘The juridical structure of language of politics constitute the contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position outside this field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating practices’ (p. 324). This entails that gender is a construct, inspired by certain vested interests, and as a construct it is, it has a constructor that has used its discretion to give this effect. It therefore is worthwhile to ask, in a social setting: ‘What sense we make of a construction that cannot assume a human constructor prior to that construction?’ (Butler, 2004, p. 325). And the answer, in most of cases is that patriarchy and its agents are the constructors of discriminatory gender roles. Assuming that gender is a construct, it is possible therefore to ‘presuppose and preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender configuration within culture’ (Butler, 2004, p. 327).

Nepali Fairy Tales and the Voiceless Femininity

Having argued that fairy tales showcase ideological baggage of a society, this paper now examines four representative Nepali fairy tales to demonstrate how girls and women are depicted, and didactically acculturated to behave. All quotes from the Nepali fairy tales reproduced in this paper hereafter are the researchers’ own translations from original Nepali.

The Story of Sumnima

‘The Story of Sumnima’, collected in Timsina’s (2010) Arun Upatyakaka Lokkatha:¹ Part II is a story of creation popular in the Arun Valley of Nepal² where the Kirtas live as a dominant cultural group. The story goes back to the time when primordial human mother Sumnima, who later gave birth to the human beings, was born to mother Ninamma Ridhum and father Vayu, the wind god.

When Sumnima grew to marriageable age, the family did not find a suitable male in her clan to marry her. Sumnima tells her mother that she would also marry Vayu as done by her mother and grandmother. Vayu, however, is Sumnima’s father in relationship. As she finds no suitor, the mother permits her daughter to marry Vayu. She even dictates a code of conduct:

If so, you may go. Go atop a high hill and call the wind. He will come near you. If he starts unfolding your clothes upward from the knees, you may go with him. But instead of folding upward, if he wraps your clothes around your legs, reject him. Did you get me? (Timsina, 2010, p. 2)

Gendered ideas cut across this context in two ways. First, it puts a ban on the girls’ free choice by erecting a number of conditions. Second, it places sex on the very onset of a relation, and the initiator is a male. The visual imagery of clothes unfolding upward from the knee is indicative of sexual seduction of Sumnima by a male. The mother’s advice encourages Sumnima to submit to the one who is trying to ravish her sexually; there is not a single clause resisting the ravishment. There is, however, no condition placed alongside Vayu—a male—and he is given free access to Sumnima’s body.

When Vayu comes, he wraps Sumnima’s clothes around her limbs, and the marriage fails, for there is no explicit sexual exercise. Sumnima is therefore available for other males. The next in the line is Paruhang, the mythical primordial father of the Kirats. Paruhang is ugly, with three goiters on the throat. On their first meeting, Sumnima is terrified and is unwilling to marry him. Ninamma Ridum, Sumnima’s mother announces the decision: ‘Paruhang! Sumnima does not like you. Do not feel sad; you may go back. My daughter cannot marry you’ (p. 3). Paruhang feels insulted, and vows to avenge the insult. He articulates his anger this way, addressing a caller bird:

Listen! The sun shall now get hotter. As a result, all water on earth will go dry. No water will be left on earth even for drinking. When dehydrated to her limits, Sumnima shall writhe for want of water. That moment, find my urine³ on the leaf of jauka in a tree hole. You, the caller bird, should spray the urine on Sumnima’s face. She will wake up and as who her savior god is. That moment, pour my urine into her mouth. (p. 3)⁴

There is no critical comment anywhere in the story holding Paruhang (the male) responsible for this predicament. Sumnima rejects Paruhang’s advances, and that leads to her humiliation. This context implicitly establishes the norm that a girl rejecting a marriage offer should never be thought of, and if that happens, the girl should be ready for any kind of punishment.

The urine contains Paruhang’s sperms, and Sumnima becomes pregnant. The first ever conception in Kirat story of creation is therefore a forced one. The conception leads to the birth of nine progenies,⁵ the last being Kirati, the first human. One can just surmise how, right from the days of origin, a male is taught to be willful and quite reactive and a woman docile and very submissive.

As the story progresses and mentions the activities of Sumnima’s children, instances of similar acculturation become apparent. The world this fairy tale depicts still is a heavenly world with no trace of evil. As Sumnima’s progenies grow, a wicked female character called Yagangma, who is unhappy with the presence of the human beings around her habitat in the forest, becomes envious and that leads to the birth of evil. The story echoes the context:

The world before that was like heaven. There was no ill-will among people. When Yagangma was envious of the happiness of Khakchrikpa⁵ and his sisters, the world saw the rise of avarice. This started leading to family feuds. Families fell apart and people started doubting one another. Storms were created and thunder came along. Rainbows and thunderbolts were created. As miseries increased, people started wailing in pain. (pp. 16–17)

Later, Yagangma is defeated, the sisters take their own ways, and Khakchrikpa starts living on his own. Khakchrikpa goes fishing, and one day, gets a stone struck to his hook. He carries it home and stores in a bamboo basket gifted by a blind owl. Every day, on coming back from fishing, he finds his dinner prepared, rooms cleaned, and home well-managed. Confused, he seeks the opinion of an old woman living nearby. After spying for many days, the woman discovers that the stone from the bamboo basket takes a maid’s form at midday and does all the work. She advises Khakchrikpa to marry her. Her advice is full of gendered overtones, encouraging the male to be agentic⁶ and the female submissive. She advices the boy to hide behind a sieve, and while the girl seeks the sieve to winnow grains at midday, she tells him to ‘touch’ the girl. Once touched by a male, a girl is bound to marry the former.⁷ The way the old woman advises the girl and intrigues her to marry Khakchrikpa is indicative of gendered social acculturation: ‘Daughter! My grandson happened to touch you. Once a male touches a girl, she must marry him’ (p. 20). The girl is forced into saying ‘yes’ to this relation. Here no one feels it important to consider the girl’s plea: ‘Kapingani! Kapingani!’ or, ‘I cannot be yours, for you have repeatedly humiliated me by throwing me back into the river considering me a stone’ (p. 20).

There is yet another episode of this story where Sumnima, like in the origin myth, sets out to create life. She first thinks of creating a man and erects a statue out of gold. As the statue does not respond to her call ‘Manukhé!’ (Human!), she tries with silver, copper, bronze, and iron. When all fail to respond to her call, she seeks the advice of a cock that suggests her to make a statue out of its droppings, eggs, and ash. Sumnima does so and the statue breathes. Elated, she calls him ‘Manukhé!’ and the man responds ‘yes!’ Considering how foolish she was in being unable to decide the right material before, she curses her own stupidity and says, ‘Thukka, Marija’, which means, ‘May death be there!’ (p. 24). But the sentence Sumnima says to herself turns out to be a cast upon the first man, and with his birth, death is born.

Sumnima, the primordial woman is, therefore, made accountable for death of the human life. This leads yet to another conclusion that Sumnima, as long as she has remained submissive and communal⁸ in the entire story has been a source of creation. The moment she denies being submissive and undertakes to use her own creative faculty, the results have been disastrous. For example, when she rejects Paruhang’s marriage proposal, a terrible drought ensues leading to the drying of all water on earth. This forces Sumnima to drink Paruhang’s urine laden with sperms. In the second story, when she takes up initiatives to create man, death comes along. It is not just death; the story further holds Sumnima responsible for creating diseases. Sumnima, as the stories depict, also brought death and disease into life she herself created. In other words, when she stops saying ‘yes’ to everything she is dictated to do, and whenever she starts using her own creative faculty, the results are disastrous. The social establishment wants Sumnima to remain submissive and communal or face the consequences or bear the charge for bringing misery to others. This is deterring; anyone who reads the tale can derive a lesson of deterrence from disobeying the society and for exercising her free will in a male-centered society.

Sunkeshari Maiya (The Golden-haired Maid)

‘Sunkeshari Maiya’ is one of the most popular fairy tales in Nepali society. The present discussion is based on the version collected by Sharma & Luitel (2006) under the title ‘Sunakesari Maiya’.

The story is about a princess who has golden hairs. It so happens that this princess, the single sister of three brothers, loses a strand of her hair in a river while taking bath. Alarmed, the king declares that whoever finds the lost strand of hair will be allowed to marry the girl. Coincidentally, the second brother of the girl finds it. The story is about the unimagined predicament the girl and the entire family faces, leading to a number of suicides and other consequences.

The girl has no possessive right upon her own hair, as she has been advised not to lose even a single strand. The golden hair is a metaphor for all good and rare qualities she has. But the father and the family—institutions run by patriarchal considerations—have their full say on her hair. The story reads: ‘How many strands of hair she had had been all counted’ (p. 390).

Losing a strand of hair while taking bath should have been an incident quite trivial for a woman. In a modern society where rights are equal, it should be left to the woman to ignore or mourn the loss. But that does not happen in the case of the golden-haired maid. Outright, the mother or the queen of the kingdom makes a decision and foists it upon the scenario in an autocratic way: ‘Whoever finds the lost strand of my daughter shall have her as his wife’ (p. 390).

This bait as a condition for marriage has social ramifications. Marriage, in an ordinary condition, is an affair to be decided by the mutual agreement between the future spouses. But here, the girl is not consulted, nor is it considered whether the finder of the strand would be a suitable husband for her. Secondly, the girl in the tale is made a prize object for a man’s victory. This belittles the status of a woman and treats her as a thing upon which one can force his decision at will. The girl has no agency of her own, and therefore her subjectivity is inexpressive. Additionally, marriage itself is not made an achievement; rather it is made an accolade to felicitate another achievement, namely finding of the lost hair. Moreover, attempts to get the girl in marriage are not centered towards getting the girl; they are centered towards gaining control upon her golden hair. In a way, the hair is a primitive form of dowry, and encourages the males to look for property-promises as a condition for marrying someone’s daughter. This pulling in of the question of gold into marriage affair depicts how fairy tales carry vestiges of a tradition that treats women as material objects and makes dowry an essential precondition for matrimony. It also puts males on comparative advantage, possessing rights upon a woman and the best thing she owns. This is indicative of the social conventions prevalent in the society where the story was first made, and the place is none but Nepal, though it is difficult to ascertain which particular part of Nepal. The story was first collected by Shambhu Prasad in the 1920s (Datta, 1988, p. 1008).

The girl’s second brother finds the hair, and by the word of the queen—their mother—the boy has now got to marry his own sister, the golden-haired maid. This is, in fact a predicament. But how stringent the society was and how firm the majesties were in their words is proven by the fact that preparations for the marriage are started straightaway. No one—not even the brother who finds the strand—is panicked, but the girl announces her silent objection to this unjust ruling by deciding to run away from the castle and hiding on the top of a tree. This is how she announces her agency, though in the face of heavily patriarchal normativity, the decision leads to tragic incidents one after another.

There also are examples of dissent from other characters at the girl’s exercise of agency. On finding the girl on the top of a tree, the father beseeches his daughter to come down, for the propitious wedding hour is waning. When the girl says she will never come down to accept her own progenitor as her father-in-law, the father feels humiliated. It is obvious that the father is hurt by the rejection of his authority by his own child—incidentally a girl. The humiliation of being dissented by a girl is too much for the patriarch. He commits suicide, as it can be observed in the following quotation: ‘Hearing her daughter, the father was extremely disheartened. He cursed his own fate. He said that it was worthless for an unlucky father like him to keep living. So, he jumped into the river and claimed his own life’ (Sharma & Luitel, 2006, p. 390). This suicide is symbolic; it is a mark of protest or rejection of the agency a woman that declines all family orders that are both royal and patriarchal at the same time.

This sequence of request, rejection and suicide continues with the queen and two elder brothers of the girl, including the second one, the would-be groom. Finally, the youngest of the brothers, who is incidentally younger to the maid, goes to meet his sister and out of innocence requests her to take him atop the tree as well. She does so, and gives her rice and sesame grains to eat, with the warning that he shall not drop any of the seeds. But a young boy as he is, he cares little for what his sister says and drops half of the seeds down on the ground. Out of them emerges a herd of cattle—cows and buffaloes in many numbers—and start grazing around. The defaulter in this case is a boy, though all his mischief turns out to be a productive miracle. The cows and buffaloes help them found a new ranch. Here, even a mistake made by a male is justified by pulling in dues ex machina⁹ from out of the blue. But the girl’s single mistake, as trivial as losing a hair strand while bathing is made an issue, and a cause of so many deaths in the family.

How the girl and the boy’s dairy industry goes along also has gendered connotations. The boy goes after the cattle; he is entitled for all adventures out of home. The girl is asked to take care of the dung, the fodder and the tether. It is the boy who everyday instructs the sister what to do and what not to. Though he is of younger age, he is the decision maker in the small family of the two.

There is yet another version of the story that also features a maid with golden hair although there are slight differences in the overall structure of the story. The second story is told by Sthir Junga Bahadur Karki and recorded by Purna Prakash Nepal ‘Yatri’ (1984) in Bheri Loksahitya. Yatri names the story ‘Maiya Sunakesharako Katha’ (The Story of the Golden- Haired Maid).

Like in the story of the golden-haired maid discussed above, Karki’s version of the story has as its central character a girl with golden hair. The differences are many, but the bias against the females is quite apparent like in the earlier version. The later version features a poor farmer’s family, consisting of the couple and three children: a daughter and two sons, the younger of whom is dumb. They have a barren land that has gone out of use due to a long spell of drought. The family is in peril. When the father goes to seek the astrologer’s opinion, he gives a strange advice: ‘If you want to irrigate your field and sow seeds, you need to bury your golden-haired daughter there. Only then, you will have water. Else, there is no way; you can stop hoping’ (p. 483).

Here, the approach of the astrologer (a male), for whatever reason it might have been, is prejudiced. Out of the three children, there is no explainable reason why he should recommend the death of the daughter. Secondly, the decree upon a woman—the single female progeny of the man—is expressive of a patriarchal mindset. The story holds the potential to establish the lesson that if any child of afamily is to be spared it is the girl child that deserves the axe. This is an indirect suggestion that a male progeny will be needed later on to plough the field, while a female one can be easily dispensed with, if need be. The youngest boy, who is dumb, rejects the astrologer’s suggestion but agrees and kills his sister. From the girl’s grave, a bamboo shoot springs, which a minstrel cuts and converts into a hudko¹⁰—a drum-like musical instrument. Every afternoon, the maid walks out of the instrument and cleans all the unwashed dishes and manages the household. The story runs like this:

One day, as always, the musician had his lunch, left his dishes unwashed, and walked out to herd cattle, leaving his hudko at home. Back home in the evening, he saw all dishes washed; the entire house had been swept clean too. This took the musician by utter surprise. (p. 487)

Here again, the girl takes up indoor tasks like cleaning and washing. This is suggestive of the doctrine that a girl should remain at home and clean or wash.

Another facet of this story that entails a passive indoctrination of the females is the role a girl is assigned. Here the golden-haired maid has no exercise of her beauty offered by her golden hair. She is presented as a passive character, who has no agency, no voice. She is depicted as a very weak character who cannot even defend herself from the assault of a dumb brother. The subtle suggestion is that women do not or cannot object to a decision if it is made by the male member of the family. This inability to object leads to silence—a forced one though, as Oelofsen (2009) would claim—and is structurally defined and institutionalized. Oelofsen claims that to remain silent is often the ‘only option when the person who offended you has power over your career, your safety or your life’ (p. 2).

The way the incarnation of the golden-haired maiden is forced to marry the hudko player is another instance of subjugation. The girl is caught in a trap where she has no option but to marry the self-proclaimed groom. One afternoon, while she is out of her hudko, her secret abode, the man breaks the hudko and she is left with no option but to return to the man’s mundane world from her mythic existence. Forced, she accepts the man as her husband.

iii. Raja Mansarko Katha (The Story of King Mansar)

Collected by Nepal ‘Yatri’ (1984) as told by Sthir Junga Bahadur Karki, this fairy tale features King Mansar who has three wives—a case that exemplifies polygyny. None of the wives gives birth to a child and the king is worried. He goes to consult an astrologer, who advises him to drop as many mangoes as he can from a tree near the palace in one stick throw and eat those with his queens.

Back home, the king orders his youngest wife to drop the mangoes. In an attempt, he gets three, one short of the four of them—three queens and the king. To get one more, she makes a second attempt, violating the rule. This attempt restores all the mangoes back to the tree.

In the next attempt, she gets three mangoes again. She places them safely at one corner and goes to the meadows to graze her cattle. On coming back, she finds that the mangoes have been eaten up by the other two, leaving the cores (endocarps) out in the yard. She sucks the cores in indignation.

While the king is away for a long time for penance, the two queens who ate the pulp get sons, while the third, who sucked the core, gets a daughter.

This very episode, leading to the birth of sons and a daughter, opens the story for critical scrutiny. The two queens, who beget sons, are happy while the third one, with a daughter is not only unhappy but also quite envious of the elder queens. The story runs like this: ‘The queen was besieged by intense anger. She took all the three children and dumped them inside a hole and covered it with the upper part of a stone grinder that bore the wooden handle’ (p. 490).

But the children do not die; a doe that comes to spend her night there suckles the kids. Gradually they grow strong enough to push the stone cover out and come out of the hole. Then they build a grass house and start living there. How they divide their tasks between home and out of home once again gives a clear indication of gendered schematics.

The way children divide tasks for the brothers and the sister goes like this: ‘Leaving the sister back at home for the whole day, the brothers would go into the forest in search of food. In the evening, they would come back with killed birds. Then the three would roast them and eat. This way, their lives rolled on’ (p. 490)

The ‘home’ in the story is always tagged with the sister, and the forest, hunting and adventure with her brothers. The fairy tale perpetuates the message: daughters are weak; home is the safest place for them, while the males are strong, and they can undertake risky adventures. Acceptance of the conviction would lead but to the endorsement of the doctrine that women, as Thomas Paine¹¹ would opine, are ‘procreator and steward of the family’ (cited in Nall, 2013, p. 52).

The story allows some voice and some impotent protest on the part of the girl only to bounce it back upon herself. She is denied what she seeks. In fact, she is denied the right of equality she seeks from her brothers. The story runs like this: ‘One day, the sister said, ‘Brothers! Today, I want to go with you as well’. ‘No, you cannot go; you don’t go. Do remain at home’, replied the brothers’ (p. 490).

But she does not give in. The brothers are bound to take her. They take her to some distance, kill a bird or two, and say, ‘Now you go home. Take these birds, roast them, and eat. We will return in the evening. If you come with us further into the deeper forest, you will be lost. So, you better go home’ (p. 490). The result is obvious: the daughter has to go back.

At home, the story passes through many fantastic episodes, until the girl is attacked by a demon. The demon eats the girl up, and out of fury, the brothers set the house on fire, bringing death to themselves as well. The boys incarnate as two bamboo shoots, and the girl as a lotus flower. The incarnations themselves are gendered; the bamboo shoots bear a phallic suggestion, while the lotus indicates the vaginal. This makes sense, for it is the lotus-like shape of the girl, and not the bamboo-like shape of the boys that takes the story along.

King Mansar, the father of the children in their previous lives, one day comes along that way, and is attracted by the flower. The king pays no attention to the two well-grown bamboo shoots. What attracts him is the lotus. The king repeatedly tries to pluck the flower. This ‘plucking’ symbolically speaks of the king’s amorous advances towards the object of beauty and the violence thereof.

Hai Rani Chandani

Collected by Sharma & Luitel (2006), the fairy tale ‘Hai Rani Chandani’ features sour male-female relations, involving a middle-class boy Kumbha Singh, and his sister-in-law in the beginning. Later, the story features Kumbha Singh in love with a beautiful girl named Hai Rani Chandani.

In Nepali society, the relation of an individual, especially a female with her in-laws’ has always usually been at odds. The relation of a girl with her mother-in-law, or anyone from mother-in-law’s side (except for the husband, of course) tells the tale of sour, frictional relationship. In the story under discussion, a married woman despises the brother of her husband so much so that one day, when the boy asks the woman for water, she gives it in a tumbler that is used to carry water into the toilet. This annoys the boy, and he articulates his annoyance. The woman answers, ‘If you want, drink the water. Do not grudge for nothing. If you want to have water in a silver tumbler with a golden stout, you must have the guts to go and marry Hai Rani Chandani’ (p. 398). Badly hurt, he moves out of home with Hai Rani Chandani in his mind.

The boy reaches the boudoir of Hai Rani Chandani riding a box that can magically produce a number of things inside it and can fly to any place as wished by the user. The boy has procured the box from some fakirs with a trick. Seeing a beautiful box land outside her room, Chandani, who has, for unknown reasons, promised not to see a male’s face and never to get married, orders her helper to open the box. From inside, Kumbha Singh comes out, and her promise is broken. She accepts her fate and decides to marry the boy, even after knowing that he is not a boy from the royal family. However, her decision faces resistance from her father—the patriarch. The king decides to dismiss Chandani’s decision to marry Kumbha Singh and imposes his own will on the question of his daughter’s marriage. He proposes to put Kumbha Singh to some difficult tests, and when the queen questions what they will do if the boy fails the test, the king honks his decision putting every individual’s will at bay: ‘Queen! Thousands will come to woo our daughter. Can we give everyone a girl when we have only one? If he fails the test, we will find a new boy; you don’t worry’ (p. 401). The story further comments, ‘The queen could not change the king’s mind with any attempt’ (p. 401).

The king’s will prevails. The boy is called for, and a tough test is planned. On being asked what he possesses, the boy mentions four things: the magic box with infinite capacity and power to fly as willed, a magical club that would finish the enemies in a trice, a cooking pan that cooks anything fancied, and a cap that would make the wearer invisible.

Impressed by the mention of the magical club, the king asks the boy to finish off his enemies in the east and make their kingdoms a part of his empire. The boy does as directed in four hours and wins the king’s approval for marriage.

This incident calls for interpretations. The king executes the daughter’s plan on one condition that has something to do with his masculine design, his kingly ambition to go for imperialism. The story establishes the norm that for a woman to get her wishes granted, she has to please a male’s ego. By corollary, it makes the female subordinate to a man’s desire and position.

Later, Kumbha Singh and Chandani take leave of the king and the queen and set out for Kumbha’s home with a lot of jewelries and riches. On the way, the boy loses his four magical things back to the fakirs, and along with them, loses his jewelries. Stripped off everything, they go to the kingdom of Kunja Nagar and become weavers. A handkerchief knitted by Chandani impresses the king so much that he calls the couple to the palace. The boy is appointed a commander in the army, and the girl becomes the chief storekeeper. But soon, the king falls for the girl, and intends to capture her and make her his wife. Unable to resist the king’s advances, she pulls him into an accord that for six months she won’t see any male, and after the sixth month, she would marry the king. Her hope is that in six months’ time, they can escape from the palace. When this duration wanes, she asks her husband to get a horse ready at midnight, and she would escape with the help of the rope from the top floor, in the guise of a male warrior. Knowing of this plan, a robber awaits her in the guise of her husband and flees with her. On the way, she realizes that he is not her husband. She then pretends to be thirsty and requests the man to fetch water. When he is away, she rides away to safety.

This play of power to gain a woman opens questions for scrutiny. Chandani falls prey to repeated masculine hunts starting from the king to the robbers. This masochistic tradition teaches all beautiful women to fear the male and sets the tone for an antagonistic relation between the sexes.

The run-away bride reaches a kingless kingdom in the guise of a male warrior. The soldiers immediately request the male warrior to accept kingship. The story is that the queen of the kingdom has a fatal touch, and whoever becomes the king dies at her first touch. Chandani is spared because her faith in her husband Kumbha makes her declare to not touch the queen at least for six months.

This tradition that the touch of the queen kills her every husband, comes from a popular myth in Nepal. The story draws upon the mythical Newari story of Mayaju, the princess of Bhaktapur, who is cursed with such a doom: any prince, who marries her, is killed the next day, bitten by snakes that come out of her nostrils while they make love for the first time. Allusion to the same too is found in Subedi’s (2011) play Bruised Evenings.

Once again, a woman is made the cause of destructions both in the story of Hai Rani Chandani and Mayaju of Bhaktapur, who brings each of her newly wed husbands to death immediately after they have a sexual interaction with her. No reason is given behind such predicaments. Stories simply say that males die at the touch of these accursed females, meaning that they are the cause of doom for the male folks. This holds the danger of perpetuating the idea that women are sources of black magic and death, which is a dangerous allegation for the entire sex.

Conclusion

Like many other verbal artifacts, fairy tales are laden with political connotations. They are not just moralizers and entertainers, as they are sometimes thought to be when taken discreetly as children’s literature. Fairy tales also recapitulate social doctrines and perpetuate the type of ideology the dominant classes want to use.

Nepali fairy tales that belong to the Kirat’s creation myth depict woman as the source of life, as all women are, and also a source of death, miraculously recapitulating the role of Eve in man’s eternal fall, and of Pandora in bringing evil to the world. There are other stories, where a woman who uses her agency and right to personal decision is punished, sometimes as heinously as making her drink a man’s urine as in the case of Sumnima, for exercising her will. Some other stories like ‘Sunkeshari Maiya’, and ‘Hai Rani Chandani’, confer right of decision to the males, and make a female devoid of right even upon her body. Once again, the stereotype of making women a cause of evil is reproduced here, holding the golden-haired maid responsible for the death of her parents, and two brothers, for example. Similarly, some other tales confer all qualities of strength and the business of warfare upon the males, and docile beauty and passivity upon the females, only to conclude that a woman, owing to her beauty, is a thing to be sought for, possessed, and ravished. Parallels are found in the ‘Story of Sumnima’, and ‘Hai Rani Chandani’ that depict beautiful girls that are either forcefully possessed by men of power or ravished by gods. Tales hold that a woman, despite her beauty, is to be confined to a room with no right to choose for herself a suitor of her desire. Silence and shyness are promoted as qualities of an ideal woman, while advocating that women are for silence and meek adherence to her husband’s decrees while the males have the license to be willful, with rights to have multiple wives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mahesh Paudyal

Mahesh Paudyal, an Assistant Professor at Tribhuvan University, has authored two collections of poems: Sunya Praharko Sakshi in Nepali and Notes of Silent Times in English. He has translated Dancing Soul of Mount Everest, an anthology of modern Nepali poetry, and Voice of Nepal, a collection of modern Nepali poems. He has translated two memoirs of former Bangladesh President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman: Unfinished Memoirs and Prison Diaries from English into Nepali.

Raj K. Baral

Raj K. Baral is an Assistant Professor at Tribhuvan University, Nepal. His research interests span from non-western rhetoric, literature and language, academic integrity, cultural studies, online learning, and higher education/policy. He has been published in Distance Education, Cogent Arts and Humanities, Journal of Academic Ethics among others. Currently, he is pursuing PhD in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso, USA.

Notes

1 Folk Tales from Arun Valley.

2 Arun Valley is the deepest valley of the world, formed by Arun, the longest river of Nepal. The valley extends over Sankhuwasabha, Bhojpur and Dhankuta districts of eastern Nepal.

3 In Chudamni Bandhu’s version, no explicit mention of urine is found; rather he mentions that Paruhang had left ‘tuna gareko pani’ i.e. ‘water with magic spells’ [Bandhu, C. (2001). Sumnima ra Paruhang.” Nepali Loksahitya. Kathmandu: Ekta Books, p. 303.].

4 The tale also bears a stark analogy with an incident in the Shiva Purana where, Shiva, who was disturbed by Agni (the Fire God) while having sex with Parvati, throws his semen into the mouth of Agni. Agni later pukes the fire into the wild. The wives of the seven Rishis bask in the fire and become pregnant. Kumar Kartikeya is born to them.

5 In Bandhu’s version, only five progenies have been mentioned, and the humab being is the second one. Some mention four, making human being the last. Timisina’s version, which this research refers to, originates from Arun Valley where the Kirats have the thickest population. Khakchrikpa is the other name of Kirati, the first human child born to Sumnima.

6 “Males are guided predominantly by controlling tendencies referred to as agentic goals. These goals stress self-assertion, self-efficacy and mastery. Accordingly, males tend to forcefully pursue goals having personal consequences” (p. 522) (Meryers-Levy, 1988).

7 In Hindu tradition, offering presents to a woman, romping her hair, touching her ornaments and dress, sitting with her on a bed, all these acts are considered adulterous (samgrahana). Also, if a man touches a woman in a place which ought not to be touched or allows oneself to be touched in such a spot, all such acts done with mutual consent are declared adulterous (samgrahana).” (Manusmriti, Chapter 8, verses 357, 358).

8 “Females are believed to be guided by communal concerns. Their emphasis is on interpersonal affiliation, a desire to be with others, and the fostering of harmonious relations amongst themselves and disparate parties” (p. 522) (Meryers-Levy, 1988).

9 Latin ‘god for the machine,’ first used by Horace in his Ars Poetica, the term denotes a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly solved with the unexpected entry of some new event, character, or object.

10 Hudko, a drum-like instrument used in Western Nepal by minstrels, who sing Hudkeli. [Pant, J. (2007/8). Hudkeli. Loksanskriti, 3(1). Nepal Music Center.].

11 Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was an English American poet, activist, author and political theorist.