The paper traces the literary history and historiography of the Bengali "rupkatha" or fairy tale genre. It argues that despite being claimed as an indigenous genre, the rupkatha shows more alliance to the European fairy tale tradition than to Indian narrative traditions.
Key points
- Rupkatha first emerged in the late 19th century during British rule in negotiation with Western fairy tales. Over 30 fairy tale books were published from 1880-1920s by British officials, their wives, and educated Bengalis.
- The British studied Indian folk tales to better understand and control their subjects after the 1857 rebellion. This later joined hands with Indian nationalism as educated Indians took over folklore collection themselves.
- Unlike Indian narrative traditions characterized by embedded tales, rupkatha has a linear structure akin to European fairy tales popularized by the Grimms and Perrault.
- The rupkatha was considered a children's oral genre from rural feminine sources. But it was a deliberate written construction by urban educated men modeling Western tales.
- The genre allowed both colonial complicity and nationalist responses. Its ahistoricism and timelessness were celebrated to give it charm and antiquity.
- Over time, the rupkatha incorporated elements like Bengali folk rhymes and songs. It also evolved into allegories, satires, etc. questioning gender and power hierarchies. Its flexibility has made it part of everyday discourse.
Colonial study of Indian folklore and power balance
After the 1857 rebellion against British rule, there was a realisation that the colonial administration did not understand their Indian subjects well enough. Knowledge of local culture could help consolidate power better.
Accordingly, systematic surveys were undertaken by British civil servants to gather native folk tales and myths. This was an ethnographic exercise centered around colonial knowledge-production and control. Indians were studied as anthropological subjects whose traditions offered clues to keep future unrest at bay.
However, the dependence on Indian informants and translators also gradually centralized native voices. Educated Indians entered the discipline through assisting roles and by learning English.
Over time, as anti-colonial feelings intensified, Indian scholars changed from being native narrators to collectors and editors in their own right. The preservation of folk arts got tied to nationalist politics as the quest for an authentic indigenous identity against colonial culture.
So the likes of RC Temple and William Crooke studying Indian tales for administrative needs got displaced by Late Behari Day and Dineshchandra Sen celebrating the greatness of those very tales for cultural nationalism.
The shift marked both the limits of British ethnographic study as well as the increasing Indian participation in academic production and political self-fashioning through those tales. It marked the conflicted transition from imperialist control to nationalist self-awakening through the symbolic terrain of folklore.
Breaking away from Indian prose traditions
Indian prose tradition going back to the Panchatantra is known for nested, embedded narration. Stories contain sub-stories, characters recount other tales, and so on recursively. These intercalated, non-linear tales with multiple frames distinguished Indian style from Western linear plot progression.
However, the Bengali rupkatha consciously broke away from Indian practice of tales within tales. Instead, it adopted the European fairy tale model of compact, singular tales with a straight plot line from introduction to resolution.
These linear tales focus only on one main narrative without major digressions or characters embedding extraneous stories as in classical texts. They progress sequentially through a beginning, rising action and clear denouement mirroring European conventions solidified by collections like Grimms' tales.
So unlike meandering Indian tales involving concentric layers of subplots, detours and character perspective tales, the rupkatha went for clarity, simplicity and transparency in plot structure. Tales follow a objective, unified arc understandable to children rather than complex, subjective story-cycles aiming at refined readers.
This distinction underscores how the modern Bengali fairy tale was a deliberate construction aligning with colonial modernity's linear sense. Orality gave way to literary models privileging order, coherence and innocent delight marking European fairy tales for child audiences.
Feminine oral tradition or construction of the elite men
The Bengali fairy tales or rupkatha have been traditionally associated with orality, rural backgrounds, women as narrators, and children as the audience. The prefaces to popular collections like Thakurmar Jhuli invoke nostalgic memories of mothers and grandmothers narrating these tales to put children to sleep.
However, the author argues that this image of a spontaneous feminine oral tradition is a myth. In reality, the modern Bengali fairy tale genre was deliberately modeled on the European fairy tales. The pioneers who shaped the rupkatha were urban educated men from Calcutta deeply influenced by colonial culture.
People like Lal Behari Day and Rabindranath Tagore, despite glorifying the oral tales of rural women, were themselves very well-versed in Euro-American fairy tale collections. Their fairy tale books do not have complex, embedded narratives akin to Indian styles. Rather they are compact, linear stories for children resembling Western fairy tales.
The author contends that this linear structure, focus on children, and association with feminine orality suited the nationalist agenda to retrieve an ancient, pastoral, folk identity. However, the very act of collecting, editing and publishing oral tales in print transformed them into written literature for the urban audience.
So in the author’s view, the Bengali fairy tale was a deliberately constructed genre by elite men to serve ideological ends rather than a spontaneous form organically emerging from rural women's storytelling traditions. Its literary history reveals the complex negotiations between orality-print, rural-urban, feminine-masculine in colonial Bengal.
Contradictory uses of fairy tales
On one hand, studying and publishing native folk tales aligned with colonial knowledge-gathering projects. British officials edited works like "North Indian Notes and Queries" through Indian informants that served imperial needs. Educated Bengalis like Lal Behari Day also dedicated their books to British folklore collectors. So early folklore research facilitated a colonial complicity.
However, as anti-colonial nationalism grew, the fairy tales with the aura of antiquity, rural simplicity and authenticity were co-opted for cultural pride and political identity. The rescue of timeless national treasures from disappearing gave a purpose to the educated middle-class. Figures like Tagore promoted the tales as a remedy to children reading foreign stories.
Here the author argues that the ahistorical nature of fairy tales, their supposed existence since time immemorial, lent them both charm and efficacy for the opposed agendas above. Colonial scholars called them considerably older than European tales to study native psychology. Nationalists claimed them as an unbroken connection to ancient India that print-modernity was eroding.
In reality, as the paper shows, the fairy tale genre itself took shape through colonial modernity. But depriving the stories of context, movement and changing form served contradictory projects. Static, collective fairy tales could voice dynamic nationalist sentiment through print. Their anachronism itself satisfied various historically situated needs.
Evolution of Bengali fairy tales
In the initial standardizing phase, the tales aligned more to the Western structure. But over time, indigenous elements seeped in:
- Bengali folk rhymes and songs were incorporated as verse adjuncts to add local color and a lyrical quality. This followed Sanskrit styles of embedding poetry in prose narratives.
- The tales also absorbed styles like the geetkatha with songs to intensify emotional moments, not just entertain.
Beyond absorption though, the tales also adapted to rising socio-political themes:
- Many tales became allegories commenting subtly on power relations, spiritual versus material ideals.
- An undercurrent of parody, satire and irony also emerged in comic tales to question hierarchical assumptions in society and traditional narratives themselves.
- Most importantly, modern authors like Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Leela Majumdar employed the fairy tale form to overturn conventional gender representations and stereotypical roles.
Through such continuous renewal, the fairy tales remain dynamic and relevant in contemporary Bengal across classes and groups. Their generic fluidity enables their persistent cultural presence - from bedtime stories for children to everyday metaphors e.g. achieving something impossible compared to the magic of fairy tales.
So the rupkatha's flexibility, openness to new themes and sensibilities while retaining familiar motifs account for its widening influence from kids to adult mainstream and countercultures.