Text · riddle-story cycle · India
Vetālapañcaviṃśati
Also known as Vetala Panchavimshati, Baital Pachisi, Vikram and the Vampire, Vetala tales
Twenty-five tales told by a vetala to King Vikramaditya, each ending in a dilemma the king must judge, and each judgement costing him the corpse he is carrying. It is the tightest frame-story machine in Indian literature: the frame is a trap and the stories are the bargaining.
- Date
- 1000–1200
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
It circulates inside the Kathāsaritsāgara, as an independent Sanskrit text in four recensions, as the Hindi Baital Pachisi used to teach the language to Company officers, and as Richard Burton's Vikram and the Vampire of 1870, which is where the vetala became a vampire in English and stayed one.
Connections (2)
- Scriptural inclusion inKathāsaritsāgara
The twenty-five Vetala tales sit inside the Kathasaritsagara and also circulate as an independent book in four Sanskrit recensions, in Hindi as the Baital Pachisi, and in Tamil, Telugu and Marathi. A cycle that can be lifted out of its compendium and travel on its own is how most of this material moved, and it is why attributing any of it to one author is hopeless.
- AnalogueŚukasaptati and the Tūtīnāma
The Vetala tales and the Sukasaptati are the two Indian cycles built on postponement: a corpse that must be carried while riddles are answered, and a parrot that talks until dawn to stop a wife leaving. Scheherazade is the same device, and the Arabian Nights' frame is generally traced to an Indian or Persian original of exactly this kind.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Baital Pachisi”. Richard Burton, Vikram and the Vampire (1870); the Vetālapañcaviṃśati recensions ed. Heinrich Uhle (1881).
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