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 Maehrchen 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
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 Viehmaennin 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 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.