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Unit 10: Once There was a King by Rabindranath Tagore

open-ended structure in this genre so that the emotional effect and the ending of short stories Notes
often remain inconclusive. The quintessential postmodern, ambiguous shortest of short narratives
could be one where on two sides of the same paper are written — ‘once upon a time’ and ‘there
was a story’ respectively. If the reader goes on and on, turning from one side of the paper to the
other, even then it remains inconclusive, which is the beginning and which the end? As a
reflection of the inconclusive, confusing, unstable world today, short stories eschew a strict
maintenance of causality leading to an ending that clinches a moral, and question, through their
deliberate structure, both the nature of the readers’ involvement with the text and possible
readings of our world.
Rabindranath Tagore, famous as the Nobel winning mystic, oriental poet, had started writing
short stories in 1891 and had written nearly a hundred of them. In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century Indian context, we cannot expect Tagore’s stories to have themes that suit our
jet age, computerized tastes. In terms of chronology, moreover, we do not expect them to deal
with meta-fictional narrative modes and postmodernist ambiguity, because their setting remains
limited to the experiences of Bengali men and women under British rule. It can be found that
Tagore anticipates these postmodern emphases on the permutations and combinations governing
character-structure today, especially in the open-ended ‘closure’ of narration in ‘The Lost Jewels’,
‘Hungry Stones’, ‘Once there was a King’, ‘The Victory’ and ‘Vision’, among other famous short
stories of his.

In ‘Once There Was a King’ the story begins with the sentence “once upon a time there was a
king” and the narration continues with that. The narrator says that though a very young child
does not differentiate between one king and another so long as there is a king in the story,
modern readers are more perceptive and exact, critical and suspicious. They ask the name of the
king and if, for example, the answer is Ajatsatru, the next series of questions flow freely as to
which of the Ajatsatrus of different historical periods was being referred to. Only when the
storyteller makes a proper reference to history does the modern audience accept the story as one
that is instructive. Continuing with the reference to childhood love of stories and a willing
suspension of disbelief, the narrator says that an appeal to his mother had given him respite
from his tutor for a day. The comment that follows is interesting because it reads: “I hope no
child… will be allowed to read this story, and I sincerely trust it will not be used in text-books
or primers for schools” (Omnibus, 881). Dispelling the illusion of the autonomy and integrity of
the world of his narration deliberately, the author permits real life to impinge upon fictional
construction generally presented as a complete world. This is definitely an anticipation of
metafictional narrative strategies used extensively with full consciousness of the significance of
such authorial stance in late twentieth century fiction. Again, as the story continues, the
grandmother telling the tale tells her audience that the king had left behind the queen and
princess in an attempt to pray alone in the woods so that he would be blessed with a son. When
he returned to the palace after twelve years and decided to marry his beautiful daughter to the
first man he came across next morning, she was married off to a Brahmin boy of seven or eight
years. The story is interrupted again:
If my grandmother were an author how many explanations she would have to offer for this little
story! .... This would be regarded as absurd.

Even if she could have got so far without a quarrel, still there would have been a great hue and
cry about the marriage itself. First, it never happened. Second, how could there be a marriage
between a princess of the warrior caste and a boy of the priestly brahman caste? Here readers
would have imagined at once that the writer was preaching against our social customs in an
underhand way. And they would write letters to the papers. (Omnibus, 885).
A mere telling of a fairy tale by a grandmother is turned by Tagore into a truly postmodern
narrative where gaps, questions, puzzles and multiple possibilities in audience-response are

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