Birbal and the khichdi
Reading time aloud: about four minutes.
The best-known Akbar and Birbal story, and the one that makes the point most elegantly.
One winter the emperor Akbar was walking by the river with his courtiers, and the cold coming off the water was so sharp that everyone drew their shawls tighter.
"No man could stand in that river all night," Akbar said.
A poor man standing nearby spoke up. "Your Majesty, I could. If there were a reward."
There was. A thousand gold coins if he stood in the water from dusk until dawn.
He did it. He stood in the black river all night, shaking, while guards watched from the bank, and at first light he waded out alive.
He came to the court for his thousand coins, and the courtiers began to ask questions. How had he survived? Had he had a fire? No. A blanket? No. Had he seen anything at all in the night?
"Only a lamp," he said. "There was a lamp burning in a window on the far bank. I looked at it all night."
The courtiers were delighted. "Then you cheated! You warmed yourself at the lamp!" And Akbar, persuaded, sent him away with nothing.
Birbal did not come to court the next day. Or the next. On the third day the emperor sent for him, and was told Birbal was at home cooking khichdi and could not be disturbed.
Akbar went himself. In the courtyard he found Birbal sitting beside a small fire — and hanging from a tree, five feet above the flames, a pot.
"What are you doing?"
"Cooking khichdi, Your Majesty."
"It will never cook. The pot is nowhere near the fire."
"No further," said Birbal, "than the man in the river was from the lamp."
The man was found and paid that afternoon.
How an argument can sound reasonable and be nonsense, and how the way to answer it isn't always another argument. Birbal doesn't debate the courtiers — he builds the same claim out of khichdi and lets everyone look at it. Worth pausing before Birbal speaks and asking a child what they'd have said.
Sometimes the man is a soldier, sometimes a woodcutter; sometimes the reward is a thousand coins and sometimes land. There's a near-identical story about Mullah Nasruddin told from Turkey to Central Asia, and Tenali Rama has his own version in the Vijayanagara court — the same joke, borrowed happily across three empires.
See also: Tenali Rama and the cat.
Last updated: 2026-08-11
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