It is commonly believed in India that proverbs were invented by idiots. If this was the case, the idiots of India in the past must have been richly endowed with practical shrewdness.
Indian proverbs may not inculcate a high strain of religion and morality, but the maxims of prudence and practicability they contain exhibit great sagacity and keen insight into human nature.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Many of these maxims mutually confirm and are confirmed by the proverbs of England and other nations. A Latin proverbs tells us to make speed slowly, and an English proverb says, “The more haste the less speed, as the tailor said to his long thread.”
These two proverbs have for their Indian equivalent, “A hasty man returns twice before he reaches his destination,” an observation the truth of which has been frequently exemplified in everybody’s experience.
Image Source: linguistics.ohio.edu
An English proverb tells us to “cut our coat according to our cloth”; in India we are warned to “stretch our feet according to our bed.” The uselessness of “crying over spilt milk”, is expressed in India by the general precept that “one should not lament over what has happened.”
Sometimes, on the contrary, the Indian proverbs gives the illustration, and the English the general precept. For instance, English proverbial wisdom reminds the dilatory that “delays are dangerous,” and warns them “not to put off till to-morrow what they can do to-day,” the evil of which is exemplified in India by the case of a foolish man who “when his house has caught fire begins to dig a well.”
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The folly of “casting pearls before swine” is in this country compared to placing “a looking-glass before a blind man,” or ridiculed by asking “What taste has an ass for sugar?”
In India, to warn us against being misled by externals, we are reminded that “everything that is white is not milk,” and that “everyone who is black is not the devil’s brother-in-law,” which are equivalent to the common English proverb, “All that glitters is not gold.”
The belief that “speech is silver and silence is golden”, is expressed by an epigrammatic Gujarati adage : “The wise man speaks once, the fool at once.”
The danger of “falling between two stools” is in India brought home to us by the saying that “the guest of two houses will be hungry.” Another proverb bearing on the subject of hospitality points out the folly of overstaying our welcome.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
“A man,” we are told, “is a guest on the first day, on the second day he is not cared for, and if he stops on the third day, he is a senseless man.”
If no English equivalent readily presents itself expressing the truth conveyed in this proverb, it must not, therefore, be supposed that Indian hospitality is more easily exhausted than English hospitality. No doubt in England and all over the world, even among the Arabians, hospitality is often overtaxed by too long visits.
Sometimes the truth conveyed in India by a proverb is in England exemplified by a typical character. Sydney Smith gives an amusing account of an old lady called Mrs. Partington who, when the sea flowed into her house, tried to sweep it out with a broom.
Hence forward the struggle of Mrs. Partington and her broom against the Atlantic Ocean, became the type of the folly of using ridiculously inadequate means to hinder the irresistible course of events.
Such ineffectual efforts as those made by Mrs. Partington are ridiculed by two Indian proverbs, of which one says, “Before a gale the breeze from a fan has no effect,” and the other asks, “Would the sea-gull support the sky if it should fall?” Mark Tapley, in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit.
Who found subject for self-graduation in the dismal swamps of Eden, has his equal or superior in the Indian woman who is supposed to say, “It is just as well that my husband has been carried away by a tiger; for he is saved from much forced labour.”
The more we compare English and Indian proverbs, the more we recognise the close similarity between the popular opinions of the two peoples on all ordinary questions of practical wisdom.
However, much difference there may be between the manners and customs, and between the individuals, of the two nations, there is a wonderful agreement between the judgments arrived at in India and in England on matters of everyday life by the majority of the common people, whose opinions have been handed down from generation to generation in the form of popular proverbs.