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"A Flowering Tree" is a short story written by A. K. Ramanujan in his 1997 book ''A Flowering Tree and Other Folk Tales From India''. In actuality, it is a Kannada folklore told by women which is translated by A. K. Ramanujan to English. The story was collected in several versions in the Karnataka region over the span of twenty years by Ramanujan and his fellow folklorists It is a woman-centered tale and attempts to establish a sisterhood between women and nature. This has been regularly done by many feminist writers. Like most folktales from around the world, ''A Flowering Tree'' synthesizes two discrete elements: first, an impossible narrative (a girl turns into a tree; a prince marries a peasant), and second, mythic archetypes which resonate deeply with all of us, no matter what our beliefs.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.barbican.org.uk/media/events/4250nchfor10-08-07.web.pdf )〕 According to Ramannujan himself who analysed the folk tale while translating it - "It is a story of woman's ecology and vulnerability of her emerging sexuality..." This was published posthumously and edited by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes along with other folktales compiled and translated by Ramanujan. His story was adapted into an opera by John Adams in 2006. ==Plot Summary== There lived a poor woman in a certain town with her two daughters. The younger daughter decided to help her impoverished family. She turned into a beautiful tree by performing a strange ritual with her elder sister. They carefully performed the ritual which required two pitchers of water - one to transform the younger to a tree and the other back to human form. Her elder sister plucked flowers from the transformed tree making sure that she doesn't damage any other part of the tree. She then converts her younger sister to human form. They weaved the fragrant flowers into garlands and sold them at the King's palace. They decided to keep this a secret from their mother and saved the money for future. One day the prince discovers those garlands in the palace and gets curious about its(flower's) origin. He followed the girls back to their house. Next morning at dawn, he went to their house and hid himself behind a tree and eventually saw the secret origin of flowers. He asked his parents (King and Queen) to marry the girl that sold flowers and told them the secret. The minister summoned the girls' mother and presented the proposal. She couldn't help but agree. Later at her house, the younger daughter had to demonstrate how she transformed into a tree to pacify her angry mother. After the wedding, several nights passed without him speaking to her or touching her. Finally he makes his demand: she must do her transformation for him. Ashamed, she resists, but finally relents and performs the ceremony for him. Her envious sister-in-law watched her do the transformation on one night. She forced her to transform into a tree and broke her branches while plucking the flowers. They also ignored the water ritual and poured water on her indifferently, here and there. When the princess changed to the human form, she had no hands and feet. She had only half a body. She was a wounded carcass. She crawled into a gutter. Next morning a cotton wagon driver spotted her and rescued her from gutter. He covered her naked body with a turban cloth. He left her at a ruined pavilion in a town. Her husband's elder sister was married to the King of this town. The palace servants informed the queen about her. She was brought to the palace, bathes, healed and kept at the main door as a "thing" for decoration. Meanwhile, the prince distraught at her wife's disappearance assumes that she left him due to his arrogance. Full of remorse, he turned into a beggar and wandered across the country. After a long time, the prince haggard and unrecognizable reached her elder sister's town. In shock, the Queen recognized her brother and brought him to the palace where he was bathed and fed. He never uttered a single word. His sister was worried and tried all sorts of ways to make him speak. One day she sent the half body of his wife in a hope that the beauty would move him. He immediately recognized his lost wife. She told him the complete incident. She asked him to perform the ritual and fix all her broken branches and then transform her back to human form in a hope that she would be normal again. The method worked. The Queen(his elder sister) bid them farewell. The King (prince's father) was overjoyed at the return of his long lost son and daughter-in-law. After discovering the bitter truth, the king had seven barrels of burning lime poured into a great pit and threw his youngest daughter into it. All the people who saw this said to themselves, "After all, every wrong has its punishment." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「A Flowering Tree: A Woman's Tale」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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