Many fables the world over narrate stories of different kinds, and many of them conclude with a moral on the greediness of humans. The Mahabharata narrates a story in which certain wild birds spit gold for a man, who out of greed strangles them for more. The Panchatantra tells a story about a Brahmin who offers milk every day to a serpent in an anthill in his fields and receives a gold coin each time. He later entrusts the job to his son, who gets greedy, and tries to kill the serpent to unearth all coins from the anthill. But his son dies in the process. The father laments on the irreplaceable loss, but continues to give milk to the serpent, which then drops a gem as a final gift and departs forever. The Brahmin casts aside the gem, considering it of no value when compared with the wealth that he would have received on a daily basis. “No confidence is to be placed in a reconciled foe” is the inherent moral. The story surely had its roots in an age-old Indian belief that serpents guard hidden treasures and possess a gem on their hood.
The Buddhist Suvanna Hamsa Jataka narrates a story about a golden hamsa (swan), which shows pity for a poor woman and gives her one golden feather on each visit. She and her daughters become rich. But the woman becomes greedy and plucks out all of the swan’s feathers, which end up as normal white ones. The woman keeps the swan in a barrel and feeds it. When the feathers grow, the swan flies away, and never returns. “Contended be, nor itch for further store” is the essential moral in this story.
‘The Goose with the Golden Eggs’, attributed to Aesop, the Greek fabulist, became popular worldwide. A man possesses a goose that lays a golden egg each day. But dissatisfied with such a menial growth, he kills the goose to grab all the eggs, but finds nothing inside. The story gave way to an idiom, “Much wants more and loses all”. Thomas James had translated the fables in 1851, and John Tenniel, a British artist had illustrated the tale. Though the story makes no mention of a woman, the illustrator had shown the owner’s wife too. The story has a number of Eastern analogues in which the goose is replaced by hens or other birds. A Russian version involves a duck, husband and wife, and in the end, their son becomes the Tsar of an empire. A part of the story had somehow seeped into Telugu language and led to the coining of “Bangaaru baatu guddu” (the golden egg of a duck), an idiom that is often uttered when one stumbles upon something valuable, quite unexpectedly. The idiom, which is also very unique in the sense that the finder of the duck is content with one golden egg without craving for more, also figures in a popular song of a Telugu movie, Vetagadu (The Hunter, 1979).
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Many Telugu scholars suggested that baatu in Telugu had been coined after pato (bato?), a Portuguese word for a duck. In many Indian languages too a similar sounding word for a duck is used; baatu-koli (Kannada), vaatu (Tamil), badak (Konkani), batak (Marathi/Gujarati), battakh (Hindi). In Sanskrit, the bird is known as kaadamba, vartaha and even hamsaha. In Bengali, hans means a duck or a swan. In Malayalam, the bird has a unique name, taaraavpaksi, in which I only know that paksi means a bird. Telugu scholars had proposed that the baatu-lu were brought to India by the Portuguese (known in Telugu as budata-keechu) when Vasco da Gama (d. 24 December 1524 at Kochi) reached Calicut, Kerala, in a ship on 20 May 1498. Interestingly, Sri Krishna Deva Raya of the Vijayanagara Empire had written in his long poem in Telugu, Amuktamalyada (c. 1517), a verse that mentions ducks for the first time in Telugu literature. While translating the poem from 2005 to 2009, and even after publishing it in 2010, I couldn’t resist wondering about the probable presence of the duck in Vijayanagara art, and searched for the same, wherever I had gone on field work or some other exploration relating to visual art. To my own delight, I have photographed two carvings, which in my opinion show the duck; one in Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, in 2009, and another on the outer compound wall of Sri Chintala Venkataramana Temple, Tadipatri, Andhra Pradesh, more recently in 2019.
Pemmasani Timmarayudu II, a subordinate of the emperor-poet who wrote the Amuktamalyada, had constructed the Tadipatri temple. The verse, which mentions the ducks, in an afresh rendering by me goes as follows:
“At dawn, guards reached the city outskirts where they saw something white next to a canal amid paddy fields. They thought that some Brahmins had left their white garments after bathing in the canal. When they tried to collect the garments, they were white ducks, sleeping with their beaks tucked into their wings. As the ducks suddenly woke up and slipped into the canal, the guards were confused. Women guarding the paddy fields, so amused were they that they started laughing.”
Even the verse hints that the male guards of the city were not familiar with ducks and their confusion made the women guarding the nearby fields burst into laughter. Women as a strong protection force in the Vijayanagara period is another pertinent topic of discussion, which perhaps could be dealt with in a separate article, sooner or later.
Srinivas Sistla, Associate Professor in Art History & Aesthetics, Department of Fine Arts, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam (sistlasrini@gmail.com)