Folk-Tales of Bengal
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
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“She rushed out of the palace ... and came to the upper world.”
Rev. Lal Behari Day
Author of ‘Bengal Peasant Life,’ etc.
With 32 illustrations in colour
By Warwick Goble
St. Martin’s Street, London
1912
COPYRIGHT
First Edition 1883
With Coloured Illustrations by Warwick Goble, 1912
TO
RICHARD CARNAC TEMPLE
CAPTAIN, BENGAL STAFF CORPS
F.R.G.S., M.R.A.S., M.A.I., ETC.
WHO FIRST SUGGESTED TO THE WRITER
THE IDEA OF COLLECTING
THESE TALES
AND WHO IS DOING SO MUCH
IN THE CAUSE OF INDIAN FOLK-LORE
THIS LITTLE BOOK
IS INSCRIBED
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 Mährchen 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 and cast
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 is 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.