Chapter II: Princess Labam

_Source._--Miss Stokes, _Indian Fairy Tales_, No. xxii. pp. 153-63, told by Múniyá, one of the ayahs. I have left it unaltered, except that I have replaced "God" by "Khuda," the word originally used (see Notes _l. c._, p. 237).

_Parallels._--The tabu, as to a particular direction, occurs in other Indian stories as well as in European folk-tales (see notes on Stokes, p. 286). The _grateful animals_ theme occurs in "The Soothsayer's Son" (_infra_, No. x.), and frequently in Indian folk-tales (see Temple's Analysis, III. i. 5-7; _Wideawake Stories_, pp. 412-3). The thorn in the tiger's foot is especially common (Temple, _l. c._, 6, 9), and recalls the story of Androclus, which occurs in the derivates of Phædrus, and may thus be Indian in origin (see Benfey, _Panschatantra_, i. 211, and the parallels given in my _Æsop_, Ro. iii. I. p. 243). The theme is, however, equally frequent in European folk-tales: see my List of Incidents, _Proc. Folk-Lore Congress_, p. 91, s.v. "Grateful Animals" and "Gifts by Grateful Animals." Similarly, the "Bride Wager" incident at the end is common to a large number of Indian and European folk-tales (Temple, Analysis, p. 430; my List, _l.c. sub voce_). The tasks are also equally common (_cf._ "Battle of the Birds" in _Celtic Fairy Tales_), though the exact forms as given in "Princess Labam" are not known in Europe.

_Remarks._--We have here a concrete instance of the relation of Indian and European fairy-tales. The human mind may be the same everywhere, but it is not likely to hit upon the sequence of incidents, _Direction tabu_--_Grateful Animals_--_Bride-wager_--_Tasks_, by accident, or independently: Europe must have borrowed from India, or India from Europe. As this must have occurred within historic times, indeed within the last thousand years, when even European peasants are not likely to have _invented_, even if they believed, in the incident of the grateful animals, the probability is in favour of borrowing from India, possibly through the intermediation of Arabs at the time of the Crusades. It is only a probability, but we cannot in any case reach more than probability in this matter, just at present.