A herd of goats is threatened by a pride of lions, and it falls to one brave billy to face the danger alone.
PV Ramaswami Raju published a collection of Indian Fables in 1887, shortly after he was called to the Bar and while he was teaching Indian languages at Oxford University and later at London. His fables are a creative blend of tradition and imagination: this one tells how one wily old goat saved the whole herd with an audacious bluff.
In this fable from India, a sly little insect teaches a jackdaw that all that glisters is not necessarily edible.
William Cowper’s ‘The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm’ told how a glow-worm persuaded a hungry bird to spare his life because light and song complement each other so beautifully. In the following Indian fable by Ramaswami Raju (playwright, London barrister and Oxford professor of Telugu), the hard-pressed glow-worm does not have such dainty material to work with.