The failure of the only Indian Puss in Boots we know to establish a theory of an Indian origin, does not, of course, prove a negative. We can only say that puss certainly did not come from India to Europe by the ordinary literary vehicles, and that, when he is found in India, he does not preach what is called the essentially Buddhist doctrine of the ingratitude of man and the gratitude of beasts.
There remains, however, an Eastern form of the tale, an African version, which is of morality all compact. This is the Swahili version from Zanzibar, and it is printed as Sultan Darai, in Dr. Steere's Swahili Tales, as told by Natives of Zanzibar (Bell and Daldy, London, 1870). If a tale first arose where it is now found to exist with most moral, with most didactic purpose, then Puss in Boots is either Arab or Negro, or a piece in which Negroes and Arabs have collaborated. For nowhere is the conte so purposeful as among the Swahilis, who are by definition 'men of mixed Negro and Arab origin.' There may be Central African elements in the Swahili tales, for most of them have 'sung parts,' almost unintelligible even to the singers. 'I suppose,' says Dr. Steere, 'they have been brought down from the interior by the slaves, and perhaps corrupted by them as they gradually forgot their own language.' Thus Central Africa may have contributed to the Swahili stories, but the Swahili Puss in Boots, as it at present exists, has been deeply modified by Mussulman ideas.
Sultan Darai, the Swahili Puss in Boots, really contains two tales. The first is about a wicked step-mother; the second begins when the hero, losing his wife and other kinsfolk, takes to vicious courses, and becomes so poor that he passes his time scratching for grains of millet on the common dustheap. While thus scratching he finds a piece of money, with which he buys a gazelle. The gazelle has pity on him, and startles him by saying so: 'Almighty God is able to do all things, to make me to speak, and others more than I.' The story comes, therefore, through narrators who marvel, as in the fairy world nobody does marvel, at the miracle of a speaking beast.
The gazelle, intent on helping the man, finds a splendid diamond, which he takes to the sultan, just as puss took the game, as 'a present from Sultan Darai.' The sultan is much pleased; the gazelle proposes that he shall give his daughter to Sultan Darai, and then comes the old trick of pretending the master has been stripped by robbers, 'even to his loin-cloth.' The gazelle carries fine raiment to his master, and, as in the French popular and traditional form, bids him speak as little as may be. The marriage is celebrated, and the gazelle goes off, and kills a great seven-headed snake, which, as in Russia, is the owner of a rich house. The snake, as he travels, is accompanied (as in the Kaffir story of Five Heads) by a storm of wind, like that which used to shake the 'medicine lodges' of the North American Indians, puzzling the missionaries. The snake, like the ogre in all Hop o' My Thumb tales, smells out the gazelle, but is defeated by that victorious animal. The gazelle brings home his master, Sultan Darai, and the Princess to the snake's house, where they live in great wealth and comfort.
Now comes in the moral: the gazelle falls sick, Sultan Darai refuses to see it, orders coarse food to be offered it; treats his poor benefactor, in short, with all the arrogant contempt of an ungrateful beggar suddenly enriched. As the ill-used cat says in the Pentamerone—
De riche appauvri Dieu te gard' Et de croquant passé richard!
Finally the gazelle dies of sorrow, and Sultan Darai dreams that he is scratching on his old dustheap. He wakens and finds himself there, as naked and wretched as ever, while his wife is wafted to her father's house at home.
The moral is obvious, and the story is told in a very touching manner, moreover all the world takes the side of the gazelle, and it is mourned with a public funeral.
Here, then, in Zanzibar we have decidedly the most serious and purposeful form of Puss in Boots. It is worth noting that the animal hero is not the Rabbit who is the usual hero in Zanzibar as he is in Uncle Remus's tales. It is also worth noticing that a certain tribe of Southern Arabians do, as a matter of fact, honour all dead gazelles with seven days of public mourning. 'Ibn al-Moghâwir,' says Prof. Robertson-Smith, in Kinship in Early Arabia (p. 195), 'speaks of a South Arab tribe called Beni Hârith or Acârib, among whom if a dead gazelle was found, it was solemnly buried, and the whole tribe mourned for it seven days.... The gazelle supplies a name to a clan of the Azd, the Zabyân.' Prof. Robertson-Smith adds (p. 204), 'And so when we find a whole clan mourning over a dead gazelle, we can hardly but conclude that when this habit was first formed, they thought that they were of the gazelle-stock' or Totem kindred.
It is quite possible that all these things are mere coincidences. Certainly we shall not argue, because the most moral form of Puss in Boots gives us a gazelle in place of a cat, and because a certain Arab clan mourns gazelles, while the gazelle hero is found in the story of a half-Arab race, that, therefore, the Swahili gazelle story is the original form of Puss in Boots, and that from Arabia the tale has been carried into Russia, Scandinavia, Italy, India, and France, often leaving its moral behind it, and always exchanging its gazelle for some other beast-hero.