Reading Notes: Week 2 Anthology

(Tiger, Mike the Tiger Wikipedia page)

The story that I will be taking notes on this week is The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal, the Indian fairy tale from this unit.  This fairy tale stood out to me because I found all three of the characters to be interesting in their own way, and because I had never read it before.  But I think the most fascinating character to me was the jackal.  The other characters' motivations were clear: the tiger wanted to escape the cage at first and then to eat the brahman; the brahman wanted to do a good deed and then wanted to survive his encounter with the tiger.  But the jackal does not really seem to have as obvious a motivation.  Perhaps he takes pity on the brahman's circumstances.  Maybe he is seeking to right the injustice done against the brahman for simply doing a good deed.  Or possibly he has an ongoing conflict with the tiger, so he just wants the tiger to return to the cage (maybe the jackal was the one to put the tiger in the cage in the first place!).  I wish the story had given more details to why the jackal would want to help the brahman.

One potentially interesting way to rewrite the story might be to swap which of the characters are animals and which are humans.  That way, it would be a human initially trapped in the cage, until an animal rescues the human.  But then the human threatens to eat the animal unless the animal can get someone else to decide to release him.  The story would then end with a human tricking the first human to go back into the cage.  I wonder if this alteration would change the ultimate moral of the story somehow.  Right now, it seems to be a message about karma, about how good deeds have a payoff and that you cannot get away with double-crossing.  But if the animal-human roles were reversed, it seems like the moral could be about biological conservation--that humans should not dominate over animals simply because we believe that we are superior to them.

Bibliography:  Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, with illustrations by John D. Batten, (1912).