Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

:INDIAN FISHING 49ichthyic wisdom—meet us fairly frequently. Manu i is savedfrom the Flood by a fish. Buddha 2 answers questions as toabstention from fish. Wondrous fish occur : e.g. the Kar," which knows to the scratch of a needle's point by how muchthe water in the Ocean shall increase, by how much it isdiminishing." 3Stories, such as the recovery by a fish of Sakuntala's ringand the consequent marriage of King Dushyanta ; of Indra,the fearless slayer of the serpent, whose death for defiling thebed of Ahalya was compassed by fish *; of Adrika's transformationinto a fish and her conception in that form of a childby King Uparicaras ;* of The Stupid and Two Clever Fishes ; ^of The Frog and The Two Fish,^ all these make pleasant ifvaried reading. But when we come to methods of fishing, allvariety vanishes. We are confronted with a damnable monotony,a foujours perdrix.It is almost Net, or Nothing,This holds true of the piscine tales even in the ArabianNights, e.g. The Fisherman and the Jinn, and The Fisherman andthe 'Efreet. The latter, however, possesses an unique interestthe fisherman here, unlike his Greek and Roman povertystrickenbrethren, became by means of his miraculous fish," the wealthiest of the people of his age, and his daughterscontinued to be the wives of princes " !Evidence that fishing in India was of old and is now (thefishing caste, I am told, ranks low) not highly regarded can bededuced {inter alia) from its total omission in the FourteenSciences and the Sixty-four Arts, which the VdtsyayanaKama Siitra (not later than the third centuiy a.d.) promulgatesfor the education of children from five to sixteen.Among therequisite Sciences gymnastics, dancing, the playing of musicalglasses, sword-stick, cock quail and ram fighting, teachingparrots and starHngs to sing, all these find commendation,but fishing none !^ The Story of the Flood in the Catapatha Brdhmana.* Sacred Books of the East, xx. 252. Cf. x. 41.* Ibid., xvi. 7. Cf. xxiii. 239, and v. 65.* De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), vol. ii. 331, f.' The Pancatantra, I., Story 17.* A Group of Hindoo Stories, by an Aryan (really F. F. Arbuthnot) (London,i38ij. p. 35.