Types and Motifs

Type AT 1210, The Cow Is Taken to the Roof to Graze. Type AT 1245, Sunlight Carried in a Bag into a Windowless House.

Hundreds of numskull stories (Types AT 1200–1349) are told all over India, as elsewhere. Sometimes they are organized into a series, as in the present tale or as in AT 1332, Which Is the Greatest Fool, or they are strung elaborately into whole fooltowns, as in the British tales of the men of Gotham or the Danish tales of the fools of Molbo. The best-known of these in southern India are the adventures of Paramartha Guru and His Disciples, first told in written form by Father Beschi, an Italian Jesuit who lived in Tamilnadu and wrote in Tamil in the eighteenth century. One is not sure whether he reported these from Europe or heard them locally. Yet they have certainly become part of the Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada oral traditions. [For a translation of Costantino G. Beschi's collection, see Benjamin Babington, The Adventures of the Gooroo Paramartan (London: J. M. Richardson, 1822).]

Numskull tales, as in Europe, are very old, told and retold in the earliest collections like the Jātakas and the Pañcatantra. Large numbers of them punctuate the longer romances in the Ocean of Story.