How do you get a group of English-medium students interested in Bengali folklore? That's what our founder set out to do in Otibeguni's first ever folklore workshop at the Summerfield International School - Literature Festival.
Students were provided four decks of cards representing the 4 Ps (People, Power, Place, Plot) of storytelling and asked to work in groups to create their own story using common motifs from Bengali folklore. The resulting stories were weird, funny and sometimes really intuiging.
We had a team that imagined a king with a magical tree whose fruits spawned new queens, thus parodying the polygamy trope found in our folklore. Another team imagined a Rakkhoshi driving around an ice-cream truck collecting children not for herself, but for her flesh-eating Byangoma bird. They managed to reverse the role of a Rakkhoshi as a reluctant henchman and the Byangoma as a vicious killer.
The students seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed the workshop and were excited to go beyond the allotted time to present their wonderfully bizzare folklore-inspired stories. Word of this fun workshop reached the school's principal within minutes and she personally came to thank our founder. We managed to present her a copy of Otiprakrito too!
Overall, the workshop was a resounding success, and we will definitely take important lessons from this experience to refine the content for future workshops.
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