The Story of Lalpila
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Story of Lalpila is an Indian folktale collected from the Baiga people by ethnologist Verrier Elwin. It is related to the cycle of the Calumniated Wife, and is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children".
These tales refer to stories where a girl promises a king she will bear a child or children with wonderful attributes, but her jealous relatives or the king's wives plot against the babies and their mother. Many variants of the tale type are registered in India, although they comprise specific cycles in this country. In one of the cycles, the king's children's play-pretend with wooden horses leads to their father discovering the truth. Variants of the sort are recorded in Asia (India and Iran), and also in Spain and in Africa.
Sources
According to Verrier Elwin, the story was sourced from the Baiga, in Taliyapani, in Mandla district. The tale was previously published in Elwin's book The Songs of the Forest, and sourced from a Baiga named Hothu, who told the tale "in a remote village of Bilaspur". In Hothu's tale, the prince's name is given as Lāl. However, Shyam Parmar republished the tale as Lal, stating that the story was the "Gondi version" of a Malwi story titled Kag-Udawanɪ, thus "identical" to other tales from North India.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Story of Lalpila” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.