Introduction
In 1850, Charles Dickens’s magazine ‘Household Words’ carried this curious tale, written by Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor, who at the time was a correspondent on ‘The Times’ in India. Set in the legendary past, the story concerns the town of Shorapur in India, which in Dickens’s time was still a semi-independent Kingdom, and a question as simple as it is timeless: Cats, or Dogs?
ONCE upon a time, a traveller was received most hospitably in Shorapur, and with unusual curiosity: for he declared that the townsfolk would turn him out if they knew what he was. They assured him they were quite unprejudiced, so he said: I am a Mischief-Maker.
Invited to demonstrate his powers, he entered a flour-dealer’s and asked to try some honey. With growing bemusement, the townsfolk watched him sample jar after jar with a dainty fingertip. Only the Brahmin saw him flick a drop of honey onto the wall, where it stuck.
Soon, however, a fat fly spotted it, and came to gorge itself. Then a lizard glided down the wall to investigate the fly, though not stealthily enough to escape the notice of the flour-dealer’s cat. All in a moment, the fly sipped, the lizard’s tongue flickered, the cat pounced, and amid a clatter of baskets and pots a white dog belonging to a quarrelsome old fellow from across the street bounded up, barking.
Shorapur is a town in modern-day Yagdir province, Karnataka (Mysore until 1973) in southwest India. It lies about 130 miles southwest of Hyderabad, on the northern side of the River Krishna. When Dickens wrote this story, Shorapur was a semi-autonomous Kingdom in the territory of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Eight years later, in 1858, it was absorbed into the Princely State of Mysore under the British Raj, following an unsuccessful revolt by the last independent Rajah, Venkatappa Nayaka IVth.
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