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I guess the most obvious thing that stood out was the complexity!!! YEESH!!! In European fairy tales, It's normal not to focus on names. In fact names really just don't . . . matter. Women go by the names of "Hag, Woman, Mother, Wife." Men are usually identified as, "Man Old Man, Husband, Father, Woodcutter, etc." The point bieng, they really serve no purpose, so why bother to give them any names? If they have any relationship it's usually severed, like for example: " the Woodcutter died, or the Miller gave away his daughter." they serve whatever short purpose they had and we never hear from them again. Sometimes they have virtually no purpose, they might just be there for sake of saying that someone was related to the main character.
In the India tales however, there were nothing but names. In fact I spent about 20 minutes trying to keep track of who was who in Ramayana. . . . it was an utterly lost cause. Infact before the story actually started, I got introduced to a seemingly endless family tree that would've probably surpassed Jack and The Beanstalk's beanstalk. For example: "From Visnu's navel, his son was Marica. From Marica was born Kasyapa whose son was Ravi. From Ravi came Manu. From Manu Iksvaku, in whose lineage was born a king called Raghu."
That was just the beginning part of the intro paragraph. Even when they finally got to Rama there were still a list of nonstop names.
Which brings me to another difference; The plot of the tales. In European folk tales, there is a simple short episode in which the hero goes on some sort of quest to save the princess, kingdom, etc. In the end with the help of some magical item, he convieniently defeats the forces of evil (which comprises of usually one villian) and he lives happily ever after. Short, sweet, and predictably to the point. No if's ands or buts. There's usually one main hero, one main huge problem, one evil villian, and one solution which saves the entire kingdom. If it became any more complicated it would no longer be a fairy tale but a novel. That's simply not how the European folktales work. Indian folk tales however are completley different.
Dr. Alles told us "In India if the tales aren't completley complicated there is no point. there just boring." Unlike the European tales Ramayana started out fairly simple: The king was getting old and needed an heir so he chose Rama who was the eldest and most capable. Except that his stepmother gets tricked into having her son Bharata take his place, and banishes Rama. Rama however, is suprisingly chill about the concept of him bieng banished into a forest for 14 years, except Bharata doesn't want to be king and thinks Rama should be. Rama on the other hand thinks that Bharata should be king, and that just opens up a whole new can of complicated worms. Somewhere along the way Rama's wife Sita gets kidnapped and an army of monkeys and demons come into the picture, all with their own complicated set of names and the plot just gets more and more complicated along the way.
That's just one fagment of the short episode in the multiple books of Ramayana that rival the size of Harry Potter and the bible combined. Some just focus on a mere jouney to the forest alone. The episode started out simple and then what was once a simple easy problem, became a series of mulitple complicated problems, so new characters were introduced to help solve these problems, but these new characters just ended up causing more problems, so more new characters got introduced and they just ended up creating more new problems to deal with in addition to the ones already present. And soon we simply get started into an endless, visciously confusing vortex of plots within plots withing the plot of a plot's plot.
The Bangladesh tale of the Blue and Red Lotus had considerably less characters and a much simpler plot but even that plot was tricky to follow.
The last huge difference is the belief structure applied to these folk tales. The European folk tales were told more for entertainment and moral education. But they are just stories, "Old wives tales." To quote Dr. Esa, "In church we don't hear the priest talk about "Little Red Cap or Hansel and Gretel." It does not apply to our daily lives nor our belief system. In India these are not folk tales, they are real they are history. They apply these to their daily lives and belief structures. Casting these sacred tales off as mere "Old wives tales" is a great insult to them. Genocides and protests of all sorts have raged because of these tales. They believe these tales so fanatically that they are willing to die for them. They have lived by these tales for thousands of years till now because these tales are magical and sacred.
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