According to R. C. Temple, the tale was collected by author Flora Annie Steel from a Purbia boy who lived in Firozpur, and published in the magazine Indian Antiquary.

The boy scrapes the walls of the prison to dig out a hole large enough for him to pass through to the outside and fetch sweetmeats for the imprisoned women.

Seeing that her stratagem failed, the white hind queen tells him he can get the "Jogi's wonderful cow, whose milk flows all day long, and makes a pond as big as a kingdom".

The boy meet the white hind queen's mother, who directs him to follow a road of 18,000 demons, but assuages him to have no fear.

Lastly, the white hind queen then suggests the boy brings the million-fold rice, that only ripens at night, and gives him a third letter.

[6][7][8] According to German ethnologue John Bierhorst [de] and anthropologist Kirin Narayan, this tale type is "widespread in India", but variants are recorded from Chile, Sri Lanka and Herat, Afghanistan.

[12] In his second revision of the ATU index, folklorist Stith Thompson located 24 variants of the tale type in India.

[14] Indian scholar A. K. Ramanujan located variants of the tale type in Bengali, Gondi, Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi, and Telugu.

[15] Author Maive Stokes published an Indian variant titled The Demon is at last conquered by the King's Son.

He passes by a fakir's house, who alter the letter with a request for the boy to be treated with the utmost respect by the she-demons's brother, and so it happens.

After the Raksasha-Rani is locked inside the iron house, Hiralal takes out the cockatoo and shows it to the wicked queen, who turns into a monster in a state of panic.

With the fakir's new letter, the boy passes himself as the raksashi's son and learns from the grandmother about the external souls of the entire raksasha family.

Meanwhile, the raksashí queen begins to eat the entire royal family, and the palace's servants - even the cook - to sate her rapacious appetite.

With no more cook to prepare him the food, the boy takes up the job, while also avoiding any attempt of the raksashi queen to devour him.

This turns out to be a blessing in disguise: the tenth queen's son leaves the well to gather food for the others, and is found by the king, who gives him a golden arrow and a bow, and tries to hire him.

She feigns illness and requests a list of increasingly dangerous demands: first, she asks for tigress's milk; then, for a cow unlike the king has ever seen; thirdly, for water of gold from her ogress mother.

A goat they own - actually, a demoness in disguise - eats the two sons, then the Brahmani wife, and, finally, sets his eyes on the Brahman.

Since they are pregnant and have no food, two of them give birth to their babies and eat them to sate their hunger, but te third spares hers and raises him.

Later, the boy discovers he is the son of the king and his step-mother is a demoness, whose life is hidden in a parrot in the land of the demons.

The demoness queen, realizing his true identity, feigns illness and asks for remedy from the land of demons: a stalk of rice grains and gray buffalo's milk to prepare her a special food.

The boy goes to the land of demons and pretends to be the demoness's son in order to infiltrate her family's household, get the items and the parrot and return to his true mother and the other victimized queens.

She prepares to attack the boy, but he breaks the parrot's members one by one until he wrings the bird's neck, killing the demoness in the process.

[24] Scholars Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana collected an Arab Palestinian tale titled Dibbit il-mitbax ("Bear-Cub of the Kitchen").

One day, the wicked queen feigns illness and wants a pomegranate from Wadi is-Sib ("Valley of Oblivion", according to Muhawi and Kanaana).

Bear-Cub of the Kitchen destroys the flask with the sister's lifeforce, killing her, and steers the castle with magic ropes to his father's palace.

[25] Scholar Hasan M. El-Shamy reports variants of tale type 462 in North Africa, namely, in Tunisia and Algeria.

He learns in the floating castle about the secret of the king's newest wife: she hides her lifeforce inside a flask, which lies next to a vial containing the eyes of the 40 queens.

[27] Hasan El-Shamy notes that, while this is a singular attestation of tale type 462 in Egypt from the 19th century, other variants are found in the Levant Coast and in Sudan.

Intent on have the boy killed by some means, she sends him to get leche de leona ("lioness's milk") to cure her, and later for singing towers and ringing bells.

[30] Folklorist Terrence Hansen, in his catalogue of Latin American folktales, classified the tale as a new subtype he created, type **455A.