The sea and our folktales

This piece is liable to go into two or three different directions which may not necessarily be connected with each other but might, just possibly, hold some interest. For one thing, while I was at a conference on the Ports of Gujarat at Daman some months back, and was making a presentation on ‘The Painter and the Sea’, I asked myself the question: How would a painter — sitting somewhere in the Pahari region, or in the desert kingdoms of Rajasthan — have visualised the sea, something that he had never seen but might have been called upon to render in the context of a religious text, like the Ramayana or the Bhagavata Purana, in which the sea inevitably figures? What images, visual or verbal, could he have drawn upon?

An interesting passage in an early text, the Vishnudharmottaram, describing the sea, came to mind. It described ‘the ocean’ to which the gods once headed for praying to Vishnu who rests in the waters, and read, in part, like this: “They (the gods) as they came flying in their vimanas saw the ocean, which was as if …jumping, on account of the dancing waves made by the wind…as if laughing, on account of the mass of foam, …roaring as if unfettered … as if inviting the gods, with its spread arms in the form of waves….The gods saw the ocean, …asleep at some places, roaring at others; whirling at some and stumbling at others… It looked like a coral reef, from reflecting the sky with its coral like stars…” The description is evocative, almost poetic, but the ring about the passage is as if the person who wrote it had based it on conventional descriptions rather than observation. How could this have helped the painter?

The interesting thing is that the sea figures in our imagination more perhaps than we realise. Take the folktales, or vrata-kathas. I remember, as a child, sitting down to hear a popular katha which spoke of a flourishing trader whose fortunes suddenly dipped because his ships got caught in a storm on the seas and everything was lost. But then, as a result of his prayers, through divine intervention or blessings, he chanced upon an island where he discovered untold riches. The islands in tales or kathas such as this bear names like Ratnadvipa — island of jewels — or Suvarnadipa — that of gold — on which sailors or traders land unexpectedly — serendipity, so to speak, that word almost certainly a corruption of the word suvarnadipa — and regain lost fortunes. There are dangers on the seas but also opportunities the stories seem to say. To a land-bound people, like those living in the northern parts of our country, all this must have sounded like a fantasy: inviting and mysterious, perhaps even romantic, all at the same time.

In this very connection, I came upon a text — the Shripala Raaso — to which Ratan Parimoo drew our attention some years back. The title obviously names a person — Shripala — but the second word in it links it to the Raaso or Raasau tradition which has a long history in Indian literature, beginning with the 12th century. Essentially, a Raaso is spoken of as a “versified romance of a popular character, mostly from Rajasthan and Gujarat”, written generally in what is called Old Western Rajasthani or Gujarati. The theme very often, as per lexical definitions, is “either heroic, cantering on the warlike prowess of some Rajput hero, or on the love affair between a Rajput prince and princess, entailing long and painful separations between the lovers which lend themselves to lyrical developments”. The most famous of all Raasos is the Prithviraj Raaso by the bard Chand Bardai, celebrating the valour of Prithviraj Chauhan but there are countless others like the Beesaldeo Raaso, the Hammir Raaso, the Pancha Pandava Raaso. In this category also falls this Shripala Raaso, composed by a Jain muni at Rander, not far from Surat, late in the 17th century and illustrated in a manuscript dated 1829 with very folkish images that is now in the LD Institute of Indology at Ahmedabad. It tells a long and involved story of a Rajput prince who was stricken by leprosy but got cured through the blessings of a goddess and on account of his constant worship of the Siddhachakra Yantra. The action shifts to a trader called Dhaval Sheth at Bharuch, owner of a large fleet of ships, who first befriends Shripala having seen his exploits as a warrior, but later becomes jealous of him.

At one point, when Shripala has already become entitled to half the Sheth’s wealth, he even tries to throw him into the sea but Shripala escapes by magically riding a crocodile and so on. Everything falls into place eventually, and Shripala lives happily ever after as a noble and pious prince, along with his two wives.

But the tale, with all its turns and twists, is told with relish and contains a large measure of incidental information on ships and shipping which must have come from the muni’s familiarity with Gujarati seamen. Examples? The text speaks of the kind of men who worked on a ship: thus, one person who had the duty of observing the dhruva-manadala, meaning keeping an eye on the Pole Star for determining the sense of direction; one person with the duty of bailing out water collected in the bilge; another who had to keep watch over the rise and fall of the waters, one who would loudly beat the dhol-drum to divert the saltwater crocodiles; one, the panjari, who spotted pirate ships, and so on.

Interestingly, however, with all this detailed knowledge in the text and observation of the sea at hand, what do the painters who illustrated the Raaso in the south Gujarati style do while rendering the seas? Retreat into one of the oldest conventions in the art of India: to show water in the basket-weave pattern, curved lines intersecting with other curved lines, and introduce into it aquatic creatures, some real, and others fanciful.Clearly, habits die hard and conventions have a way of defying time.

This article was published on June 23, 2013