It was first collected in the compilation of Assamese folklore titled Burhi Aair Sadhu, by poet Lakshminath Bezbaroa.
Variants of the narrative are located in India and Southeast Asia, with few registered in the Brazilian and Arab/Middle Eastern folktale catalogues.
One day, she goes to the rice fields and sings a song to shoo away the birds, but a voice answers her his desire to marry her.
After she tells her mother about the event, Champavati's father agrees to marry her to whoever appears to them; so a snake comes to take the girl as his bride.
The snake and Champavati spend the night together, and the next morning she appears to her family decorated with jewels and golden ornaments.
Her father and her step-mother, jealous of the girl's good luck, arrange a marriage between his other daughter and a snake he captures in the jungle.
Their grief and rage are so great that they conspire to kill the Aelaagee (the younger wife) and Champavati, but the python devours both before they can do any harm to both women.
She decides to follow the suggestion and eats from his plate; she sees some villages inside his mouth and asks her husband to show her the world.
Her husband intercepts Champavati, takes the letter and kills his own mother to protect his human wife.
[5][6][7] Praphulladatta Goswami collected an homonymous tale from an informant named Srimati Jnanadasundari Barua, in North Lakhimpur.
Wanting to see her stepdaughter killed, her father's first wife says she must honor the promise, and locks the girl in her room with the snake.
The younger Maharani, fuming at the older one's luck, orders her servants to find a python in the jungle so she can marry it to her own daughter.
[29] In a Bengali tale published by Francis Bradley Bradley-Birt with the title Humility rewarded and Pride punished (alternatively, Sukhu and Dukhu),[30][31] a weaver is married to two wives, each with a daughter.
She fulfills their wishes and reaches the house of the moon's mother, who welcomes her and tells her to refresh herself at a nearby pool.
On her return, the horse, the plantain tree and the cow gift her a winged colt, a baskets of gold mohurs and a necklace, and a calf that produces milk.
Dukhu returns with the small box and Shookhu's mother, seeing the step-daughter's fortune, orders her own daughter to make the same journey, hoping she will also be rewarded.
A servant reports the incident to the other queen, Rupa, who comes to her co-queen's abode to insist her step-daughter goes through with the marriage with the python.
The next morning, however, a handsome prince opens Devi's door, and explains he was the python, cursed into that form by a jungle-god until a princess married him.
[33] In a tale from the Angami Nagas of Assam, a girl is going to work in the field, when a snake appears and blocks her path.
[37] Professor Stuart Blackburn reported a tale from the Apatani people of Arunachal Pradesh with the title Bunyi-Bunye or Two Sisters.
After this adventure, he takes refuge in a cave, kills a python dwelling inside it and wraps its skin around himself to sleep, along with his jewels and money.
Some servants enter the snake's cave and carry the python bridegroom (inside of which is Jereng, but they are not aware of the fact) to the younger sister's marital house.
Meanwhile, the elder sister, wanting to have the same fortune of her cadette, repeats her actions (hiding in a certain spot and declaring her wishes to marry a python), and moves out to her own marital house.
The next day, the parents in the village have to attend a religious event, and the couple fear for their only daughter, so they send her to shoo away the birds from their rice field accompanied by their dog, with a warning not to go to the edge of the water.
One day, the girl complains that she wishes she could improve her weaving skills and the snake lover gives her a solution: she can copy on the loom the scaly patterns of his body.
Her daughter appears and takes her to her husband's river palace, where she meets her grandchildren, who can change form between human and snake shapes.
Jealous of her stepdaughter's successful marriage, the queen asks her husband to fetch a python for her own daughter.
[45] Author Henry Parker collected a tale from the North central Province of Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka), titled The Ash-Pumpkin Fruit Prince.
Only the youngest and seventh sister decides to marry it: she enters the hut, but complains that there is not enough space for her, so the snake spares one of the seven beds for her.
[48][49] Folklore scholar Hasan M. El-Shamy registers two variants of type AaTh 433C in the Middle East and Northern Africa, which he located in Egypt.