Tulu Folk Tales: The Magic Mango and the Golden Twins

Not everything on the coast is a god or a hero. Some of it is a story told to children in the evening, about a king, two queens and a mango.

This page begins with one of them. It is not a full collection, and we have only read it as retold by others.

A tale of a king

Wikipedia’s article on the tale, which follows the English translation in The Rainboy, gives the story below. Tulu tellings differ in their details, and the article notes that the tale was first printed as Arasu Kate in 2011.¹

The king with two of everything

In the kingdom of Chandrapatna lives King Chakru-Chokru. He has two queens, Vajra and Ratna, two courtesans, two horses, two elephants, two dogs and two ponds by his palace. He has no son, his animals have no young, and his ponds have dried up.¹

Three stones and a mango

Wandering in his grief, the king meets a god in the form of a man, who gives him three magic stones. He throws the first into the dry pond, and it fills. The second, thrown in the paddy field, grows into a mango tree. The third knocks down a mango, which he is to give to his queens.¹

Queen Ratna is at her ritual bath, so the king gives the fruit to Vajra. She eats the whole mango and throws away the stone. Ratna’s maids tell her, and she has them find the stone in the ground outside, and eats that. Only Ratna becomes pregnant.¹

The drum, the dung heap and the well

Before leaving for war, the king gives Ratna a large bronze drum to beat if she needs him. When her time comes, Vajra offers her help, and Ratna has twins: a boy with a golden crown and a girl with a golden ornament in her hair. Vajra buries them in the dung heap of the cattle shed, puts a lizard and a skink in their place, and the king is told that his queen has borne reptiles.¹

Vajra’s tawny cow then gives only half its usual milk. She follows it, and finds that it has been feeding the babies. She puts them in a pot and drops it into a well, where a family of eagles feeds them. Last, she casts the pot on the water.¹

The boatman

A boatman rescues the pot and adopts the twins. An old woman comes to live with them and nurse the children, and when the two old people die, the twins stay on in the boatman’s hut. Years later an old woman from the palace visits, and the girl tells her their whole story. It reaches Vajra.¹

Quests beyond the seven seas

Vajra sends the old woman back to say that such beautiful children need a golden palace, which can be found beyond the seven seas. The brother goes, and the demons who live in the palace say they will give it to him if he can lift their giant rice pot. He says that it should shrink, if he was born in truth and raised in virtue, and it does.¹

Next, she sends him to win Singi, sister of Narayana, lord of heaven. He walks onto a field of stones, the people who have fallen to Singi’s power, and begins to turn to stone himself. He calls her, and she comes out with a goblet of water and restores him. She says he must ask her brother’s leave in heaven, and conjures a string ladder, on which he must think of neither his sister nor her. Twice he thinks of them, and twice the ladder breaks and he falls to his death, and she revives him. The third time he climbs, Narayana agrees.¹

The milk

At the wedding the bridegroom knows that his parents are among the invited kings and queens, but not which. The test is that his mother’s milk will flow. None of the queens can give it. They ask Chakru-Chokru whether he has another wife, and the disgraced Ratna, who has been made to work in the garden and eat horse-gram, is sent for. A jet of milk comes from her right breast into the boy’s mouth, and from her left into the girl’s. The king takes them home, Vajra is punished, and the brother lives with Singi, his sister and his mother.¹

Two other Tulu tellings

Wikipedia describes three more Tulu versions of the same tale.¹

• “Brother and Sister”. Collected in 1973 from an elderly woman, Akkamma of Konaje in Mangaluru, who learned it from Gauri Madiwalagitti. A priest raises the twins and gives them a flying carpet, a pot that feeds any number, and a stick that makes a golden palace. The brother fetches the bird Jatayu, then goes for a maiden, Patala Singhi. He is turned to stone and is saved by his sister’s tears.¹
• “Twin Children”. A king has three wives, and the third, Sumitra, bears the twins. A farmer raises them, and a winged horse takes the brother to the demons’ land. A poisoned feast is exposed when the food is thrown to a dog, and the king punishes the co-wives.¹
• “The Magic Mango”. The queens are Venkataputhali and Nagaputhali. The elder eats the mango and the younger the pit, and the twins are fed by a cow and then by birds. The brother marries Mardur Mard Singhi.¹

Our research notes name only the first and third of these. The second, with Sumitra, comes from Wikipedia alone.

A tale told in many places

Wikipedia places the tale in the international index as ATU 707, “The Three Golden Children”. In that type, wonderful children are taken from their mother by jealous rivals, and the family is reunited years later. It says that Thompson and Balys list 44 variants across Indian sources, that the mango’s part is a known motif, “conception from eating mango”, and that the jets of milk that prove the mother’s identity turn up in many Indian versions.¹

What we could not find

• The full text. The retelling follows an English summary on Wikipedia of a translation we have not seen. Our notes say to check The Rainboy before relying on any detail.
• Who tells it and when. We found no account of how, where or by whom the tale is told today. Our notes give the Tulu words kate and ajjikathe, “grandmother’s stories”, and say these are told at home by women to children, but we found no source.
• Other tales. Our notes list further collections, by Viveka Rai (1985), Palthady Ramakrishna Achar (2013) and A. K. Ramanujan (1991), but we have not seen them, so this page has one tale.
• A scholarly study. We found none that we could read.

Related

• The Siri Paddana: Tulunadu’s Longest Oral Epic, the long sung epics that the folk tales sit beside
• The Koti-Chennaya Paddana: A Fourteen-Hour Epic, another oral tradition of the coast
• The Tulu Language and the Tigalari Script, the language these tales are told in

Sources & further reading

The books and articles behind the numbered notes on this page.

1. Wikipedia, “A Tale of a King” (checked 9 October 2026): the plot, the three other tellings, the tale type and the motifs. It cites B. Surendra Rao and K. Chinnappa Gowda, eds., The Rainboy: Tulu Folk Tales (Kannada Language Chair, JNU / Manohar, 2018), and B. A. Viveka Rai’s 1985 thesis, Tulu Janapada Sahitya, neither of which we have seen.

This is one Wikipedia article. For further reading, our notes list Viveka Rai’s Tulu Janapada Sahitya (1985), Palthady Ramakrishna Achar’s Tulunadina Janapada Kathegalu (2013) and A. K. Ramanujan’s Folktales from India (1991).