A close-up of a dancer made up for the Mayilattam or peacock-dance, a feature of the folk culture of Tamil Nadu and other Indian states; ‘the vanity of the peacock’ was one of the ingredients of Woman in Bain’s folktale, though the dance is described as expressing joy. Bain claimed that the fables published in A Digit of the Moon (1898) had been placed in his hands by an unnamed Maratha Brahman as he lay dying of the plague — a provenance which should, perhaps, have set some alarm bells ringing. Bain warned that his fables would not sound like the highly theological Scriptures from which they were supposedly taken (known as The Churning of the Ocean of Milk), for they were less ornate, and epic rather than classical. This was Bain’s way of preparing us for something much more like the Greek myths or the Arabian Nights than the Vedas.
