The Coconut Lady is an Indian folktale collected in Rajasthan. The tale is a local form of tale type ATU 408, "The Love for Three Oranges", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. As with The Three Oranges, the tale deals with a prince's search for a bride that lives in a fruit (a coconut), who is replaced by a false bride and goes through a cycle of incarnations, until she regains physical form again. Variants are known across India with other species of fruits.
Sources The tale was collected from a Rajasthani teller named Parvati, from Bassi, in the "Rajasthani dialect of Hindi".
Summary The youngest of seven princes, Prince Alok, wishes to have a wife for himself, since a wife prepares food best for their husband, and Alok is eating food prepared by his sisters-in-law. One day in his travels, he meets a sadhu and confides in him about his lack of a wife. The sadhu agrees to help the youth and advises him to bring a coconut from a coconut palm. Prince Alok finds a coconut palm and knocks down one fruit, then plans to get another one, but the first one jumps back into the palm. The prince returns empty-handed to the sadhu, who sends him again to get only one. This time, the prince obeys and brings the coconut, which the sadhu reveals will grant him a beautiful wife.
The prince returns home and stops by a potter's house to rest for the night. While he is asleep, the coconut turns into a beautiful lady with a red saree. The potter's wife, wanting to change her poor social status, admires the coconut lady and convinces her to trade clothes with her. The coconut lady does as asked, and the potter's wife drags her outside to drown her at a well, then takes her place, pretending to be the fruit maiden. Prince Alok wakes up and, on seeing the wrong woman, brings her to the palace with him. Back to the coconut lady, she goes through a cycle of transformations: a beautiful flower appears in the well, which the prince brings home with him. The false bride crushes its petals and throws it out the window, where an amaranthus tree sprouts. The false bride wishes to have its leaves used for food, and the cook prepares to roast them, but the leaves begin to talk. The cook, scared, gets rid of the leaves in the garden, where a coconut tree sprouts. A cattle-herding boy takes one of the coconuts with him; the lady springs out of it and is adopted by his mother.
One day, Alok's horse grazes near the cattle-herding family, and the Coconut Lady, instead of chasing the animal away, pets it, leaving an impression of a golden handprint. The horse returns to its master, and Alok, noticing the handprint, goes to the cattle-herders' house to verify it. There, he finds the Coconut Lady, beautiful as ever, who reveals the whole truth to him and asks him to punish the potter's wife, who took her place. Prince Alok immures the woman in the palace as her punishment and marries the Coconut Lady.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 408, "The Three Oranges".Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. pp. 135-137. In the Indian variants, the protagonist goes in search of the fairy princess on his sisters-in-law's mocking, finds her and brings her home, but an ugly woman of low social standing kills and replaces her. The fairy princess, then, goes through a cycle of transformations until she regains physical form.Mayeda, Noriko; Brown, W. Norman. Tawi Tales; Folk Tales From Jammu. American Oriental Society New Haven, Connecticut, 1974. p. 537.
In an article in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, scholar Christine Shojaei Kawan separated the tale type into six sections, and stated that parts 3 to 5 represented the "core" of the story:Kawan, Christine Shojaei. "Orangen: Die drei Orangen (AaTh 408)" [Three Oranges (ATU 408)]. In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Online, edited by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Heidrun Alzheimer, Hermann Bausinger, Wolfgang Brückner, Daniel Drascek, Helge Gerndt, Ines Köhler-Zülch, Klaus Roth and Hans-Jörg Uther. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2016 . p. 347. https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/database/EMO/entry/emo.10.063/html. Accessed 2023-06-20.
(1) A prince is cursed by an old woman to seek the fruit princess. (2) The prince finds helpers who guide him to the princess's location; (3) The prince finds the fruits (usually three), releases the maidens inside, but only the third survives. (4) The prince leaves the princess up a tree near a spring or stream, and a slave or servant sees the princess's reflection in the water; (5) The slave or servant replaces the princess (transformation sequence); (6) The fruit princess and the prince reunite, and the false bride is punished.
Motifs The maiden's appearance According to the tale description in the international index, the maiden may appear out of the titular citrus fruits, like oranges and lemons. However, she may also come out of pomegranates or other species of fruits, and even eggs.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. p. 135. In Stith Thompson and 's Oral Tales of India, this motif is indexed as "D211. Transformation: man to fruit"..
The transformations and the false bride The tale type is characterized by the substitution of the fairy wife for a false bride. The usual occurrence is when the false bride (a witch or a slave) sticks a magical pin into the maiden's head or hair and she becomes a dove. Christine Shojaei-Kawan notes that variants of Indian tradition lack the motif of the false bride mistaking the fruit maiden's reflection in the well for her own. Instead, generally in these tales the hero faints, and the fruit princess goes to fetch water to awaken him, when a girl of a lower caste notices the fruit princess and trades clothes with her, then drowns her in water.Kawan, Christine Shojaei. "Orangen: Die drei Orangen (AaTh 408)" [Three Oranges (ATU 408)]. In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Online, edited by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Heidrun Alzheimer, Hermann Bausinger, Wolfgang Brückner, Daniel Drascek, Helge Gerndt, Ines Köhler-Zülch, Klaus Roth and Hans-Jörg Uther. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2016 . pp. 350-351. https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/database/EMO/entry/emo.10.063/html. Accessed 2024-07-03.
In other variants, the maiden goes through a series of transformations after her liberation from the fruit and regains a physical body. In that regard, according to Christine Shojaei-Kawan's article, Christine Goldberg divided the tale type into two forms. In the first subtype, indexed as AaTh 408A, the fruit maiden suffers the cycle of metamorphosis (fish-tree-human) - a motif Goldberg locates "from the Middle East to Italy and France".Goldberg, Christine. "Imagery and Cohesion in the Tale of the Three Oranges (AT 408)". In: Folk-Narrative and World View. Vortage des 10. Kongresses der Internationalen Gesellschaft fur Volkserzahlungsforschung (ISFNR) - Innsbruck 1992. I. Schneider and P. Streng (ed.). Vol. I, 1996. p. 211. In the second subtype, AaTh 408B, the girl is transformed into a dove by the needle.Shojaei-Kawan, Christine (2004). "Reflections on International Narrative Research on the Example of the Tale of the Three Oranges (AT 408)". In: Folklore (Electronic Journal of Folklore), XXVII, p. 35. In this light, researcher Noriko Mayeda and Indologist W. Norman Brown noted that the fruit maiden "generally" goes from human to flower, then to tree, to fruit again, and finally regains human form.Mayeda, Noriko; Brown, W. Norman. Tawi Tales; Folk Tales From Jammu. American Oriental Society New Haven, Connecticut, 1974. p. 537.
Variants India While organizing the Indic index, Stith Thompson and Warren Roberts noted the close proximity between types 403, "The Black and the White Bride", and 408, "The Three Oranges" - types that deal with the theme of the "Substituted Bride". To better differentiate between them, both scholars remarked that the heroine must be replaced by a female antagonist who is unrelated to her. Thompson's second revision of the international type index listed 17 variants of tale type 408 in India and South Asia.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. p. 137. In some of the Indian tales, the heroine does not come out of a fruit, but she is still replaced by the false bride and goes through a cycle of transformations. Despite this, these stories are indexed as the same tale type.
The Invisible Woman