A legendary author of those powerful moral fables is being increasingly plagiarized today. One theory says that Aesop was a slave from the Island of Samos who lived in the 6th Century Before Christ. Of those hundreds of lessons, said to be Greek fables, we have 203 of them published in English by the Penguin Popular Classics (1996). The supposed author was a slave, and no wonder, those hypothetical stories sound very real to human encounter with life. For, only those who have lived life in its real sense of the term can identify the ingredients that make life. The fables contain teachings that make the readers think how to look before they leap.
If everyone today looked before s/he leaps we would be living in a well ordered world today. These fables remind us of the reality of cause and effect; the fact that life is constructed on a moral balance; that even a negligible deed of kindness does not go unrewarded; and, that egoism and pride are not at all life enhancing emotions, to cite a few.
The educationists hold that the mass of earlier experience in the learner makes new learning easier. The tribal people, like the Nagas, are rich in fables like that of Aesop’s which prepares the Naga minds to perceive and identify with what Aesop was telling. A similar situation to the advantage of the Nagas is the parables of Jesus. Those parables sound very familiar that it feels like it is taking place in our families, villages, and fields. The Nagas, with their earlier experience of such life situations took the parables of Jesus (and for that matter the fables of Aesop’s) so lightly that their central teachings for life is taken for granted, not practiced.
In the schools some of these fables (Aesop’s) were translated into Naga dialects by the Education Department for Primary Schools which the present writer read long ago. The world of the Nagas was mostly non-Christian in those days and the Bible lessons had not been much popularized in schools. These fables from Aesop were the generators of moral sense in our young minds as well as in the psyche of the adults. These fables were not only for the young minds in the schools. When the school children told these fables to their parents the latter would listen with delight and take them as real life stories because in these folktales they had their non-human agents talking, relating, and acting. No doubt some of these fables, pregnant with moral teachings impacted them, even supporting their innate qualities of honesty, friendliness, truthfulness, generosity, and the sense of humor.
The sorry state of affairs for Aesop is: the tribal people, the Nagas especially, have assimilated those fables and even incorporated them with their fables. A student in my class would sometimes begin narrating about his/her village, “There is a story about a greedy dog in my village. One day the dog with a piece of meat in his mouth was passing through a bridge. When he saw his image in the water..."and so they continued. The fable of Belling the Cat; the baby crab and the mother crab; the lamb and the tiger; the fox’s failure to reach the grapes; the dinner exchange between the crane and the fox, etc. are some fables which have been claimed by the narrators to have a Naga origin. Even those fables with categories not available in our tribal world are told as if it had happened in our villages. We can safely say so here in our homes but if this is told to an international audience what will the listeners think! They will surely take it as plagiarism. In this age of right to intellectual properties we need to tell the young learners to differentiate the fables – those of the Nagas and those of Aesop’s. They will be saved from embarrassment and even litigations. Moreover, Aesop who has conscientized the world to live in a moral world is to be gratefully acknowledged wherever his fables are told.
Ezamo Murry, Model Village,Dimapur
