Shuka Saptati – tales of disloyal wives – picaresque or misogynist ?

Spoiler Warning: Contains spoilers for the Sanskrit collection Shuka Saptati, and the Hindi movie Mirch.

I came across Shuka Saptati after tumbling down a rabbit hole. The rabbit hole is a story of its own, maybe I will write it one of these days.

But for now, let us talk about the Shuka Saptati. Which means, seventy tales of the parrot.

Somehow, I was led to believe that it contained erotic tales told by a parrot.

Not too far wrong, but not too correct either.

What I mean is, most of the tales are about romance, sex, and infidelity, but it would take considerable leap of imagination to qualify them as erotica. More details later. Now let's begin at the beginning.

So Shuka Saptati is an old Sanskrit collection, of unknown provenance. I read it in English, naturally, like I read all Sanskrit things. First I read the old translation by B. Hale Wortham. Then I found that he had skipped some of the more outlandish stories because they were "unworthy of translation into English." And so courtesy of my friend Pramila, I also read another translation by A.N.D. Haksar, which gave the complete text in English.

The premise

Here is the premise of the story – further spoiler warnings for all of Shuka Saptati.

There is a man, Madan, who goes away on a long journey. When he is long gone, his wife Prabhavati is at first sad, but then decides to assuage her loneliness by meeting a lover. Now, Madan has a parrot which he has left with Prabha. The parrot comes to know of her intentions, and berates her. She is determined to wring its neck, but then decides not to because she tells herself that it is just a bird and doesn't know what it is saying.

She decides to go out and meet her lover after all. When she is heading out, the parrot calls out to her, and starts telling her a story. It goes something like – go if you want to meet an unfortunate fate like X. Then the woman asks, what fate did X meet? The shuka then tells the story of X. His intention is to keep Prabha hooked for so long that she is unable to go. And he succeeds. When he finishes telling the story, it is so late that she is unable to head out, and she promises to go out tomorrow instead. So on for seventy days until her husband comes back.

The Frame

First of all, let us talk about the frame. The frame of someone telling story after story to delay a bad event sounded familiar to me. Yes, I had read it before in the Arabian Nights, a more famous version of this frame. There are some differences of course – Shehrazade was telling stories to save her own life, and the parrot is telling stories to prevent a wife's infidelity. Shuka Saptati has a more of a moral policing bent. But despite that, there is similarity in the basic frame. So this makes me wonder, is this a popular frame all over the world? Or did stories travel? I am inclined to believe the latter – that the stories travelled. Instead of taking the lazy approach, if we investigate things closely, we are likely to find connections and histories. So if the stories did travel, which way did they go? We of South Asia would like to believe that the stories travelled westwards from here. But more research on Shuka Saptati and Arabian Nights is needed to confirm that.

The stories

Most of the stories are about wives getting away with infidelity. Yes, the wives are promiscuous, and yes, they get away with infidelity.

Let me give you an example. (All stories are from memory, so they may not be exact.)

There was a wife who was always visiting her lover across the river. One day, as she was coming back home from her tryst, she saw her husband coming towards her. She took the clay pot that she always carried, filled it with water, and offered the water to a deity inside the house of the procuress. She turned to the procuress friend and said, You asked me to come and pray here every night so that my husband wouldn’t die in five days. Now that I have done so, my husband will hopefully not die. Having seen her do this, the husband was convinced of her love for him, and went back home satisfied.

Most of the stories are in the same vein, although there are some stories where the cheating spouse is caught and punished. There is also a gender reversal in some stories – the man might be the cheater, and he might get away or be punished. There are stories on a few other subjects as well, like greed, deceit, and general cleverness. But the overwhelming majority of stories are about promiscuous women getting to do their thing, employing all sorts of tricks to do so.

I found some of the stories downright silly, like this one which makes no sense at all.

Once, there was a woman who went to the market to buy some wheat. She bought the wheat, bundled it up in a sack, and was walking back home when she saw her lover. She put the bundle of wheat there and went with her lover. The shopkeeper took out the wheat and filled it with dust. In a while the woman came up, took up the bundle and walked home. She gave the bundle to her mother-in-law. When her MIL opened it and saw it full of dust, she cried, where is the wheat? Why do you have dust here? The woman said, mother, the money you gave me fell down, and I spent some time in the dust searching for it, that is why I brought all this dust home. The MIL looked in the dust for the money, but was disappointed not to find it. Then the MIL could not rebuke the DIL.

But then, most of the stories are witty, with the wife employing clever tricks to get away with her indiscretions, like this one.

There was once a wife who used to go out at nights to meet her lovers. The husband got angry and complained to his elders and villagers that the wife went out every night. The wife refuted the claim, and said, it is he who goes out every night. And so it was decided that whoever was caught going out at night would be judged the unfaithful one. Then the wife went out at night. When the husband found out, he bolted the door from inside. The wife came back and saw that the door was bolted. With a loud sound she let a rock fall into the pond in front of the house. The husband, thinking that his wife had fallen into the pond, rushed out. Then the wife came around, rushed inside, and bolted the door from inside. The husband started crying, and she opened the door. From now on, let us not trouble each other over petty matters, she said.

Erotica or not?

From the nature of these stories, I think you understand why the stories might be called erotica, but are actually not erotica.

They do contain some erotic material here and there. Here's an example of Prabha's friends urging her to enjoy her fling:

              When trickling drops of perspiration

              Wash off the sandal paste from breasts

              When tinkling anklets can't be heard

              Amidst the moans, in love's contest

              When all the amorous acts occur

              With promptitude, in harmony

              That, I hold, is love's true pleasure

              The rest, my friend, is nature's course

These texts in between do give examples of South Asian erotic literature traditions, somehow they remind me of poems and songs of Krishna, etc. And still, I wouldn't say that most of the stories are erotica as such.

Sure, there are outlandish stories such as one where a married woman has an affair with both father and son. The more outlandish stories were excluded from the first version I read. Later I learned that the 'unsuitable' ones were the more bawdy ones, like the story of two wives of a possessive man procuring a young lover who pretends to be a girl and lives with the wives while the husband stands guard outside.

However, the crux of these stories is not necessary titillation, which comes to mind with the word 'erotica'. The focus is on how the women get away with these outrageous acts. In fact there is very little or no description of the affairs. At most, you will get to read that "she thoroughly enjoyed herself."

Hence, for all these stories, I would not classify this collection as erotica. But then leaving out the erotica part is also not fair because what do you call these stories then? The picaresque factor, the risqué factor, the occasional bursts of graphic erotica, the humor, the absurdity, all of these are combined in these stories, a category for such stories does not come to mind. And then, there is the fact that though not meant to titillate, there stories are centered on the enjoyment of forbidden carnal delights ….. I am at a loss as to how to categorize these stories. Maybe a risqué stream of South Asian Shringar sahitya tradition? Will just leave it for now and discuss other things.

Misogynous or celebratory?

When you see how the women get away with infidelity, you might think that this is subversive material where rebel women are celebrated. In his introduction to the book, translator A.N.D. Haksar calls the stories an example of 'picaresque' style in Sanskrit literature. That is what I thought too, at first, and was surprised because picaresque genre, where a bad guy gets away with his mischief, is usually the domain of men. And I have always rued the lack of female picaresque heroines. However, sadly, many factors would indicate that ultimately the stories are not picaresque – the protagonist of questionable character is not the heroine, she is the antagonist.

Among the factors that point to this misogyny, first of all is the frame itself, where the parrot's intention is to stop the wife from meeting her lover. And he succeeds. After all the risqué stories, the parrot gives us a preachy, moralistic ending.

And then, there is the way that these women are introduced and described. For example, they are often described as – beautiful, but frivolous / flirtatious / promiscuous. Their very names indicate their penchant for beauty, flirtatiousness and promiscuity. For example, there is Rambhika - derived from the name of capricious apsara Rambha, Shringar Sundari – beauty who likes makeup, Kamalila – sexy woman, Ratipriya – woman who likes amour, etc. There is no doubt that the parrot doesn't approve of these women.

Confusions…

But then, the parrot also makes some strange comments in between the stories, which sometimes seem to support these promiscuous women. For example, before the second story, he tells Prabha, go if you are as clever as Yaso Devi who knows the ways out of troubles. And then he goes on to tell a story where – brace yourself, for this outlandishness will test the limits of sensible storytelling – Yaso Devi's son is crazy about a married woman, a princess at that. How does Yaso Devi convince this woman to become her son's lover? By telling her that she, the princess, and a bitch were sisters in their past life. While Yaso Devi enjoyed all the lovers she could, the bitch did not, that is why she is suffering now (by having too many dogs pursue her?). And so, says Yaso Devi, have yourself as many lovers as you like, and enjoy yourself! The princess promptly bursts into tears and asks Yaso Devi to get her a lover, which she does by taking the princess to her son!

What is one to make of this outlandish and outrageous story? And of the parrot's comment where he says – go if you are as clever as Yaso Devi? That he approves of the wily and clever woman?

In some stories, the parrot almost seems to be giving instructions to Prabha – go if you have a friend as helpful as X, go if you can give a considered answer like Y did. If not for the overall frame, It almost seems like he is teaching her these tricks…

Misogyny

Despite the fact that women get away with infidelity, and the fact that the parrot makes occasional comments that are supportive of their promiscuous ways, I think the tone of the collection is ultimately misogynistic. The clues can be found inside the stories, which contain commentaries about the nature of women. For example, in one of the stories there is this line  -

One should not trust the natures

Of clawed or horned creatures

Of river, of men bearing arms

Nor of kings, or feminine charms

And this –

At a wedding, in the king's palace, in the house of another, a woman is sure to get into mischief. At home, in the desert, at a sacrifice, in a pilgrimage, at a festival, in a crowd, in a desert, in a town, in a village, free to roam about, shut up at home, in the field, in the threshing floor, coming in, going out, by day or by night, it matters not where, a woman is certain to go wrong.

*Go wrong, here, means to sleep around, just in case you were thinking otherwise…

Lines like these reminded me of the tota-mynah genre. I remember reading a couple of stories in the genre a long time ago, but I only recently learnt that it is a well-established genre of its own.

Tota-mynah stories

The genre goes like this. The tota or parrot is usually the male, and mynah is usually the female. There are several reasons why these particular birds figure in these stories, and they tell stories. One is that the parrot speaks, or mimics, human speech. The other is that these stories are a sort of battle of the sexes between intimate partners, and parrots are symbols of amorous love – being the vahana of Kamadev also – because of their intensive and long-winded amorous grooming of their partners.

In the tota-mynah stories, one of them, let's say the parrot, will tell a story. The story is usually about how bad, disreputable, untrustworthy, cunning, devious, money crazy or sex crazy, or basically just crazy, women are. Basically the kind of stories from Shuka Saptati that I talked about above. The mynah retorts with another story where she has flipped the gender – it is the man who is bad, disreputable, untrustworthy, cunning, devious, money-crazy or sex-crazy, or basically just crazy. Usually, nobody wins this battle. They might resolve it by saying something like – let's be trustworthy to each other.

In a version I read, a king and queen overhear a tota and mynah talking this way, and then proceed to have their own battle of the sexes where they tell such stories – dekhyau, yesta hunchha keta manchhe/keti manchhe. And in the end they say – but let's forget about all that and love each other.

I have dim memories of other stories narrated by tota-mynah. I cannot remember them at the moment. I will write more if I do.

Removing the mynah

What Shuka Saptati does is remove the mynah entirely from the picture. So we only have the tota speaking and defaming women. When seen in this light, the stories of Shuka Saptati make sense – they are not stories of women's rebellions, they are stories defaming the female. Their infidelity is a way of showing how bad, untrustworthy, cunning, devious, liable to promiscuity, women are.

Seen in this light, this collection is an example of what happens when folklore gets written down, and what difference gender makes in the writing down, setting in stone so to speak. That is very clear. Only the man gets a voice, only the man gets to show us how bad women are. And if women have similar stories of how they suffer at the hands of unfaithful men, such stories do not get print space at all.

And so only the tota gets to heap vile insults like these

The arts of women are these : deceitful speech, craft, oaths, pretended emotions, pretended weeping, pretended laughter, meaningless expressions of pleasure and pain, asking questions with a deferential air, indifference, equanimity, in prosperity, or adversity, making no difference between good and evil, sidelong glances directed towards lovers : that is the list of the accomplishments practiced by the ladies of the town.

And this

Shiva was made to dance a jig

And so was Vishnu in the past

Brahma was treated like a beast

Who has not been vexed by a woman?

They are the root of this worldly round

The ground which bears the sprouts of sin

The bloom that has remorse as fruit

What happiness do women bring?

This world is based on make-believe

And that is caused by women

With men, they need union, so

Eschew it and be at ease

Only once do we get to hear the mynah's version, when Prabha herself replies to the above lines –

Woman is the source of birth

And she is the source of growth

Parrot, she is the source of pleasure

How can you denigrate her?

Without her there cannot be

Happiness or pleasure

Without her man will never find

Fulfillment for himself

Although it is good to see Prabha's rejoinder, still, she also paints a woman from the male gaze – a source of pleasure, happiness, and fulfillment for a man, which  does not even make up 10 percent of a woman's life.

So yes, I would conclude that despite the picaresque heroines, the collection is ultimately misogynistic in nature. However, that is just my reading. The collection is very layered, and another reader might feel that the theme of infidelity and women getting to enjoy themselves despite social constrains is the stronger theme….

Influence on other stories

I was interested to realize that I have seen some of these stories elsewhere.

First of all, the stories of Shuka Saptati reminded me of all the stories of a Hindi movie Mirch, in which wives get away with infidelity. The fourth story in the movie, where a woman who goes out for a sexual tryst is confronted by her own husband, is, with a few alterations, the first tale in Shuka Saptati. I did google the connection, but I found none. Perhaps the story in Mirch was inspired by other similar sources. But then, there is story 28 in Shuka Saptati, which involves the husband climbing a tree and witnessing his wife in the act, which is exactly similar to one of the stories in Mirch. And how does the wife react in this situation? Now I'm going to act just like the parrot and ask you to read it for yourself, or watch the movie.

An unexpected detour – I just googled it up to see whether there's a connection between Mirsh and Shuka Saptati, and found, much to my surprise, that one of its stories is credited to, not Shuka Saptati but Panchatantra. That Panchatantra, which is marketed to our generation as moral tales featuring animal characters, is so bawdy, took me by surprise. New things to learn every day, huh! And I had no idea that Panchatantra, with its seemingly bland and sterile, slightly preachy animal tales, was so misogynistic, which this writer describes very well. Anyhow, it reinforces my thesis of what the stories of Shuka Saptati mean – that they are ultimately misogynistic, like these excerpts from Panchatantra.

Influence on Nepali folklore

I can’t really remember tales of adulterous wives getting away with promiscuity in Nepali folklore. One tales comes to mind where the woman hides a lover inside a tree, but then she is found out by the husband and punished. At the moment I cannot think of women getting away. Or maybe such stories were there, but did not make it to print because of male gatekeeping? Now that folktales are disappearing, we will never know.

But I found a version of at least one of the stories to be popular in Nepali folklore. I will narrate that story first.

There was once a woman who had many lovers. One day she invited four of her lovers into her house. That same day there was a shraddha in the house. The first lover came, she pushed him into the bath. The second lover came, she took the first lover out of bath and pushed the second one in, and the first one into the outhouse. In a similar way, all four were crammed into the outhouse, and none knew of each other's presence. She took food to all of them in the dark. One dropped his bowl on top of the other's head. Howling in pain, the second one stumbled around the room dropping and breaking things. The noise frightened the others, and eventually they all ran around and stumbled into each other, and opened the door and fled the room with half eaten plates and food in their mouths. Everyone at the Shraddha, including the woman's husband, saw them, and were shocked. See, the woman said, you did not feed your ancestors well, that is why they have come here to eat. And so the man redoubled his efforts at the shraddha, and from the next year onwards the ghosts did not come.

Now I have read two versions of this absolutely hilarious story in Nepali. Both were called Bahuni ko Kulayan – the Brahmani's character. In both stories, we have a young and beautiful Brahmin widow who is pursued by four admirers.

Already, there is moral policing in the premise of these stories, as compared to Shuka Saptati. We could not have a married woman pursued by, or in a relationship with, four men. So the woman was turned into a window, and a window being in relationships or being pursued was presumably a more acceptable premise.

In the first story, the widow likes all of them, and conspires to have them all by inviting them to her home at different times. She hides them one by one in the buingal. And finally they stumble into each other, bang each other, and flee. I have vague memories of subplots where maybe one of them breaks a pot of molasses over the other, the molasses guy rolls around in dust or feathers or something infernal and appears like a ghost or a devil and scares them all…. I will have to research this. But anyhow the basic plot is the same – a woman hiding four lovers in one room and them fleeing. This version is slightly misogynistic in the sense that the women is served her just desserts when her ruse falls apart and she does not get to be with any of her lovers.

In the second story, the woman does not like her admirers. We see a saintly and virtuous woman – who figures out a way of getting rid of her lovers. She invites them into her house one by one, hides them in her buingal, and watches them bang each other and flee. There is misogyny of a different kind here – moral policing of another kind has set in, there can be no depiction of an adulteress, the Brahmani must be pure and asexual.

Interestingly, I also have vague memories of such a story – a woman trying to hide four lovers at once in her house – in the Arabian Nights. And what's more, one of the lovers was a woman! Hahahaha. Would be interesting to compare all these versions and look at the gender dimensions.

Other shared themes

On a less bawdy note, here are some other famous Nepali folktales found in Shuka Saptati. Perhaps these stories are also found in the Panchatantra.

·       A rabbit tricks a lion to look into a well, jump in, and kill himself.

·       A man goes away on travel, giving an iron vessel full of gold to his friend for safekeeping. Upon return, his friend tells him that mice ate the vessel. How he gets his vessel and gold back is the story.

·       The story of Dharmabuddhi and Papabuddhi, where Papabuddhi steals their common wealth, and when confronted by Dharmabusshi, asks a nearby tree to be a witness. His father, hiding inside the tree, speaks the lie, but Dharmabuddhi calls his bluff by setting fire to the tree.

·       A crocodile and a monkey are friends. The crocodile's wife wants to eat the monkey's heart. The crocodile, on some pretext, takes the monkey on his back, and in the middle of water, thinking there is no danger of the monkey escaping, tells the monkey all. The monkey escapes the situation with his clever tricks.

Which one is older?

Which story influenced which one? Are the Nepali folktales older, or is Shuka Saptati older? When I read the introductions to these books, they mostly trace written traditions, and do not take folklore into account. The introduction to Shuka Saptati, for example, says that some of the stories are derived from an earlier book, Katha Sarit Sagar, and some are similar to this or that written Sanskrit text. But what if it was not derived from these texts, but from oral folklore? Or that all these texts were derived from folklore?

For example, maybe the Nepali folktales are derived from Shuka Saptati. Or maybe it is the other way around, that Shuka Saptati is a compilation of well known folktales of the time….. We will never know, and one of the reasons is that written Nepali literature has a short history, and the collection of Nepali folktales has an even shorter history, while Shuka Saptati has been around at least since the fifteenth century. So tracing and comparing antiquities is an impossible task.

Conclusion

Shuka Saptati ends with the husband coming home, the wife confessing her desire to philander but then being stopped by the parrot. The husband is thankful and happy, and the parrot ascends to heaven in a shower of flowers. Hahaha.

In conclusion, the collection is quite, quite fascinating, for anyone who wants to read witty and humorous stories. The gender portrayal is so layered that it will take quite a while to sort through. It is unique, I can think of no other collection like this. And it also says a lot about old Hindu societies.