Folk-Tales
of Bengal
By the Rev. Lal Behari Day
PREFACE
In
my Peasant Life in
Bengal I make the peasant boy Govinda spend some hours every evening
in listening to stories told by an old woman, who was called Sambhu’s
mother, and who was the best story-teller in the village. On reading
that passage, Captain R. C. Temple, of the Bengal Staff Corps, son of
the distinguished Indian administrator Sir Richard Temple, wrote to me
to say how interesting it would be to get a collection of those
unwritten stories which old women in India recite to little children in
the evenings, and to ask whether I could not make such a collection. As
I was no stranger to the Mährcken of the Brothers Grimm, to the Norse
Tales so admirably told by Dasent, to Arnason’s Icelandic
Stories translated by Powell, to the Highland Stories done
into English by Campbell, and to the fairy stories collected by
other writers, and as I believed that the collection suggested
would be a contribution, however slight, to that daily increasing
literature of folk-lore and comparative mythology which, like
comparative philosophy, proves that the swarthy and half-naked peasant
on the banks of the Ganges is a cousin, albeit of the hundredth remove,
to the fair-skinned and well-dressed Englishman on the banks of the
Thames, I readily caught up the idea I and cast about for materials. But
where was an old story-telling woman to be got? I had myself, when a
little boy, heard hundreds—it would be no exaggeration to say
thousands—of fairy tales from that same old woman, Sambhu’s mother—for she was no fictitious
person; she actually lived in the flesh and bore that name; but I had
nearly forgotten those stories, at any rate they had all got confused
in my head, the tail of one story being joined to the head of another,
and the head of a third to the tail of a fourth. How I wished that poor
Sambhu’s mother had been alive! But she had gone long, long ago, to
that bourne from which no traveller returns, and her son Sambhu, too, had followed her thither. After a great deal
of search I found my Gammer Grethel—though not half so old as
the Frau Viehmännin of Hesse-Cassel—in
the person of a Bengali Christian woman, who, when a little girl and
living in her heathen home, had heard many stories from her old
grandmother. She was a good story-teller, but her stock was not large;
and after I had heard ten from her I had to look about for fresh
sources. An old Brahman told me two stories; an old barber, three; an
old servant of mine told me two; and the rest I heard from another old
Brahman. None of my authorities knew English; they all told the stories
in Bengali, and I translated them into English when I came home. I heard
many more stories than those contained in the following pages; but I
rejected a great many, as they appeared to me to contain spurious
additions to the original stories which I had heard when a boy. I have
reason to believe that the stories given in this book are a genuine
sample of the old old stories told by old Bengali women from age to age
through a hundred generations.
Sambhu’s mother used always to end every one of her
stories—and every orthodox Bengali story-teller does the same—with repeating
the following formula:—
Thus
my story endeth,
The Natiya-thorn withereth.
“Why, O Natiya-thorn, dost wither?”
“Why does thy cow on me browse?”
“Why, O cow, dost thou browse?”
“Why does thy neat-herd not tend me?”
“Why, O neat-herd, dost not tend the cow?”
“Why does thy daughter-in-law not give me rice?”
“Why, O daughter-in-law, dost not give rice?”
“Why does my child cry?”
“Why, O child, dost thou cry?”
“Why does the ant bite me?”
Why, O ant, dost thou bite?”
Koot! koot! koot!
What these lines mean, why they are repeated at the end of
every story, and what the connection of the several parts to one
another, I do not know. Perhaps the whole is a string of nonsense
purposely put together to amuse little children.—LAL BEHARI DAY.
Hooghly College,
February
27,
1883.
Contents
Life’s Secret
Phakir Chand
The Indigent Brahman
The Story of the Rakshasas
The Story of Swet-Basanta
The Evil Eye of Sani
The Boy
Whom
Seven Mothers Suckled
The Story of Prince Sobur
The Origin of Opium
Strike But Hear
The Adventures of Two Thieves and of Their Sons
The Ghost-Brahman
The Man
Who
Wished To Be Perfect
A Ghostly
Wife
The Story of a Brahmadaitya
The Story of
a Hiraman
The Origin of Rubies
The Match-Making Jackal
The Boy with the Moon on His Forehead
The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Being Bagged
The Field of Bones
The Bald Wife
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