618 BLOOMFIELD— CHARACTER AND [April i8, 



The real interest of Hindu fiction lies in the ingenuity, imagina- 

 tiveness, and shrewdness of each unit of story-telling. Taken 

 in bulk, these stories seem fairly to exhaust all the permutations 

 which can be imagined to arise from the juncture of real or fictitious 

 persons and things with the circumstances of time and place. There- 

 fore, the individual motifs of story or fairy-tale, as found with 

 other peoples, seem to hold a kind of mass-meeting on the great 

 arena of Hindu fiction. As is well known, the ancient treasury of 

 narrative which India pours out lavishly from the time of the Rig- 

 Veda to this day, passed freely beyond the bounds of India. Not 

 only the stories and fables of entire cycles, such as the Paficatantra, 

 or the ' Seventy Tales of the Parrot,' were exported bodily and 

 taken over by other literatures, but numberless individual stories 

 and individual story traits penetrated to the farthest ends of the 

 earth. It is, at any rate, rather hard to find, in the rest of the 

 world, fable or fiction traits of marked character which do not own 

 to an Indian analogon ; many a time they may, at least, be suspected 

 to be of Indian origin. As a corollary to this last condition, nearly 

 all the more important motifs are intensely repetitious in the Hindu 

 narratives themselves, so that, as a matter of external experience, 

 there are neither absolutely original fables or stories, nor absolutely 

 original collections of such fables or stories. 



With all this wealth of themes, and the clever way in which they 

 are worked up, the Hindu story rarely goes beyond the limits of a 

 sort of thin novelette. Real types of men and women are, as a 

 rule, either wanting, or they are indicated by crude, sometimes con- 

 tradictory delineation. The biography of Muladeva, though dwelled 

 upon with some insistence, is no exception to the rule ; yet it fulfils 

 to a certain extent more modern requirements as regards delineation 

 of character. The stories told about him show more real sequence, 

 closer interlocking of cause and efifect than is customary in Hindu 

 fiction. 



The most important story of Muladeva is preserved in Deven- 

 dra's Vrtti, a sort of commentary on the Jain text called the Uttara- 

 dhyayana. Mijladeva, moreover, figures in an autobiographic episode 

 of his own life, narrated by himself to a king in Kathasaritsagara 



