Notes
1. See A. K. Ramanujan 1991b; and Sudhir Kakar. [BACK]
2. This essay is part of a series which may be called Women's Tales: They Tell a Different Story. See Ramanujan 1989, 1991b, 1993, 1982b, 1982a. As suggested in these papers, different kinds of women's materials are relevant in constructing proverbs and riddles used by women, women saints' lives and poems, tales and vratakathas told by women in women-only contexts, wedding songs, retellings of myths and epics by women, and so on. Folktales are a part of this “female tradition” yet to be explored and seen as a whole vis-à-vis other parts of the culture. The folktale universe itself (both men's and women's tales) is in a dialogic relation to the more official mythologies of the culture. [BACK]
3. In women's tales, the true antagonist as well as the helper for a woman is another woman, just as in the men's tales the hero battles always with an older male, a father-figure, often with brothers. Stepmothers, stepsisters, mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, rival women who usurp the heroine's place abound in these tales. In the tale of “The Lampstand Woman” (No. 36), even Fate is Mother Fate. (In a man's tale, Outwitting Fate, Fate is Brahma, a male.) Men in women's tales are usually wimps, under the thumbs of their mothers or other wives; mostly they are absent. Sometimes they are even dead, waiting to be revived by their wives' ministrations. Mother-in-law tales in south India have no fathers-in-law. The wife and the mother share a single male figure (who is both son and husband); the older and younger woman are rivals for power over him. In other tales, where the central figure is an active heroine, she may battle with a man, usually a husband—sometimes she has to rescue him from his scrapes, often from bondage to another woman. In a tale called A Wager (an Indian oral tale, found also in the eleventh-century Kathasaritsāgara; it is also the story of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, which he gets from Italian novella writers, who probably got it from India), she talks back or outriddles an arrogant spoiled prince, who vows that he will punish her for outtalking him. In a number of tales with active heroines, as in The Peasant's Clever Daughter, she answers every riddle that the king poses, and wins by outwitting his plans to seduce her; she has the full power of speech and uses it to her and her family's, often to the whole kingdom's, advantage. [BACK]
4. I am indebted to a discussion with Sudhir Kakar for this formulation. [BACK]
5. In other tales there are other ways of being an agent in her own behalf: for instance, in tales of abandoned wives who have to travel, often to rescue their own dastardly husbands, they travel in male disguise—as women writers like George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë often wrote under male pseudonyms. In some tales, they are not safe with their brothers or fathers who have incestuous designs on them, though the folktale universe, as it explores many different emotions and attitudes to the same situation, also presents protective brothers, though rarely protective fathers. [BACK]