Folk-Tales of Bengal

Folk-Tales of Bengal

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 Sambhus 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 Mhrchen of the Brothers Grimm, to the Norse Tales so admirably told by Dasent, to Arnasons Icelandic Stories translated by Powell, to the Highland Stories done into English by Campbell, and to the fairy stories collected by [viii]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 and cast about for materials. But where was an old story-telling woman to be got? I had myself, when a little boy, heard hundredsit would be no exaggeration to say thousandsof fairy tales from that same old woman, Sambhus motherfor 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 Sambhus 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 [ix]of search I found my Gammer Grethelthough not half so old as the Frau Viehmnnin of Hesse-Casselin 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. Sambhus mother used always to end every one of her storiesand every orthodox Bengali story-teller [x]does the samewith repeating the following formula: Thus my story endeth, ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 38488
Author: Day, Lal Behari
Release Date: Jan 3, 2012
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Illustrator: Goble, Warwick, 1862-1943