Feminist Folktales from India/Folktales from Northern India

Abstract

Gold reviews Feminist Folktales from India by Qiron Adhikary and Folktales from Northern India by William Crooke and Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and edited and with and introduction by Sadhana Naithani.

INDIA ADHIKARY, QIRON. Feminist Folktales from India. Oakland: Masalai Press, 2003. iii + 97 pages. Illustrations, geographical index, map, references. Paper, n. p.; ISBN 0-9714127-3-1.

CROOKE, WILLIAM, and PANDIT RAM GHARIB CHAUBE. Folktales from Northern India. Edited and with an Introduction by Sadhana Naithani. ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Talcs. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2002.1 + 425 pages. Index. Hardcover US$4500; ISBN 1-57607-698-9.

Here are two newly available collections of folktales from India, and both are most welcome as sources of narratives for pleasure and cultural knowledge. Beyond offering these universal, pleasing attributes of folktales, the two books could not be more different in nature. Qiron Adhikary, described on her back cover as a Bengali writer "bom and raised in Singapore and Malaysia" and currently living in San Francisco, intends to provide in her collection of twenty-three retold, undated tales from many parts of India "positive female images and role models." In Crooke and Chaube hundreds of folktales emerge from well-documented ethnographic work undertaken alxjut a century ago, in colonial times, which are quite innocent of selective priorities.

Femenist Folktales makes no claims to scholarship. Adhikary includes a "Geographical Index" and map showing the stories' places of origin, but gives no indication of the actual sources for the tales themselves, even though she does meticulously list credits for her nice illustrations (which are not, however, from folktale books). Adhikary docs not define feminism. W: are left to presume on the basis of content that her endeavor was in fact to assemble stories whose central characters are female. While these heroines are sometimes strong, wise and independent, it is perhaps predictably the case that, more often than not, things do not turn out so well for them.

For example, in the tragic Nagaland talc of "The Girl who Understood Rirds," a young girl is able to predict the future because of her ability to listen in on the conversations of doves. Her father docs not believe her words of ill omen; her mother, who does believe them, does not want her daughter to grow up to be a low-status fortuneteller. Thus the girl's traitorous progenitors collude and force their too precocious child to cat dove soup against her will. "Soon, the little girl could not understand the birds anymore; she became dull and listless" (40). After her predictions of dire drought prove true, her parents are chastised by other villagers for not heeding their prescient daughter's warnings, but this does not save her from the fate of perpetual madness into which she was cast by consuming soup made from the flesh of her avian benefactors.

Another sad story, this one from Manipur, tells of a wife and mother who, as a consequence of taking an ill-advised drink from an enchanted water hole, turns into a tigress. After hunting and eating flesh, she recollects her family: "I love being a tiger," she thought, "but I can't go away and never sec my little ones again." Thus she makes that fatal female effort to have it all. At home, fully aware that increasingly frightening tigress behaviors could endanger her beloved children, she sadly walks away into the jungle, never to return (62-6S). My point is that even in a collection aspiring to "feminism," it seems that only the exceptional story allows a wise and strong female to prosper. Adhikary does give some examples of women who achieve happy endings, such as the persevering Maya (a faithful Savitri type) in the Assamese story of the "Woman who Married a Dead Man" (23).

Ironically but fortunately for those in search of female role models, Crooke and Chaubc's far larger collection, although devoid of feminist motivations or indeed of any thematic desiderata, nonetheless offers a wider range of interesting and successful women than does Adhikary's more limited selection. Here, among 363 separate items, most of them tales, are a number that could more truly be labeled feminist-in the sense that they are about genuine empowerment. For example, the "Princess who got the Gift of Patience" describes a young woman whose troubles all begin when her father asks her and her six sisters "In whom have you confidence?"-the other six answer "in you," thereby acknowledging patriarchy; our heroine answers "in myself," setting in motion a series of difficult trials from which she nonetheless emerges married to her true love (36). It is doubtless no accident that this was told by a woman.

Folktales from Northern India is a treasure trove indeed. In it we find not only charming depictions of the perils and powers of women, but a multitude of stories rich in almost every kind of folkloric virtue: social commentary and social satire; magic and high adventure; mor»lixing platitudes plus healthy doses of subversion; and of course riddles, word play, and humor. There are animal talcs as well, and I was struck by the ways small birds and mice repeatedly prove to be creatures with whom the mighty, be they kings or elephants, must reckon-or as the moral of one story puts it "A little spark destroys a great pile of hay in a moment" (351).

We are indebted to ABC-CLIO for bringing back into print many important collections of tales from what they call the "golden age" of folklore. These include two anthologies from colonial India: Mary Frere's Old Deccan Days with a wonderful introduction by Kirin Narayan (2002) and the compendium under review here, a collection attributed to the joint efforts of William Crooke and Pandit Chaube, edited and introduced by Sadhana Naithani.

This particular volume stands out in the series, however, for it offers far more than a new introduction attached to the reprint of a preexisting book. Naithani assembled this collection by extracting Crooke's and Chaubc's entries from the contents of two journals, Northern Notes & Queries and Indian Antiquary, published over about a thirty-five year period (1891-1926). Thus Naithani makes these tales accessible under one cover for the first time. Although the editor has not annotated these tales with tale-type or motif codes, an excellent, thirty-page index will help readers identify and locate both. Index entries include standard items, such as "Faithful Animal;" "Shape Changing;" "Tests Set to Suitor;" and so forth.

Naithani provides an excellent, comprehensive, and illuminating introduction to this collection, situating it in the context of its times. When so much European attention had been bestowed on Sanskritic literary traditions and ancient archaeological findings, North Indian Notes &* Queries had as its mission "to concern itself with the living India, the contemporary India. And in its concern with the real, it placed itself in the rural society-its everyday culture, its age-old customs, its local gods and godlings..." (xxiii). Moreover, Naithani argues persuasively, NINQ entries reveal "a discourse aptly created by Indians themselves" (xxv)-both as taletellers, and as scholars.

In the process of combing both published journals and unpublished field notes and manuscripts belonging to William Crookc, Naithani was able to highlight the hitherto largely unrecognized but crucial participation in Crooke's ethnographic enterprise of Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube. Chaube's name appears as a contributor to NINQ as early as 1892. Naithani informs us that, "The papers catalogued as 'William Crooke Papers' in the RAI Archive in London contain more folkloric texts in the handwriting of Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube than in that of William Crooke and bear testimony to the fact that Chaube was an unusually prolific scholar" (xxxviii). Particularly in the manuscripts of the Indian Antiquary entries, Naithani discovers that "all the information regarding the tellers, the folktale texts, and the comments are in the handwriting of Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube. The titles in the left margin, however, are in William Crooke's handwriting" (xxxiv-xxxv).

A great virtue of Crooke and Chaube's collaboration is that "every tale carried the following credits and details: tale told by, tale recorded by, their designation or caste or both, and the place where it was recorded" (xxviii). Naithani comments, moreover, that "this systematic record of narrators and places is not a characteristic of colonial folklore scholarship." She characterizes the norm as "No body, no mind, no face, and, of course, no gender" (xxviii). However, I should note that the other volume rejuvenated by ABC-CLIO, Mary Frere's Old Deccan Days, offers another distinctive exception to this blindness under equally problematic colonial conditions: all of the stories in Frere's collection were told to her by Anna Liberata de Souza, her hired ayah or "nursemaid."

I am puzzled by Naithani's claim that in Crooke and Chaube's work, "One group of narrators is completely missing... that of women" (xxvii). While male tellers certainly dominate the book, I noticed in the credits, besides the "Old Muhammadan Cookwoman" who told of the self-reliant princess (36), one "Annie Solomon, a Native Christian woman" as the teller of "The King and Fairy" (119), and "the wife of Ramai Kharwar of Dudhi," recorded by Chaube as the teller of "The Bard and his Wife" (293).

Naithani tells us a little about some of Crooke's important storytelling sources including the Muslim, "Akbar Shah Manjhi," whose stories "are limited neither by religion nor by themes." Crooke describes Manjhi as a "quaint old blind man" (xxv). Manjhi's last name, "shows his tribal origin, while the first and the middle show that his tribe had converted to Islam." His stories, Naithani asserts, reveal "that the boundaries between all these were fluid," especially for a storyteller. Apparently, Manjhi returned again and again to narrate tales to Crooke; ever present as Manjhi's tales emerged was the diligent Chaube.

Sadly we learn that "Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube is known to have gone insane before his death in 1914. He was a bachelor and had no descendants" (xlii). Little more is known of Chaube's tragic ending, or its causes. However, Naithani wants to expand its implications, suggesting that "Pandit Chaubc's insanity not only is a personal tragedy, but is symbolic of the consequential nature of certain aspects of colonial scholarships that have either been looked over or not questioned" (xlvi). Yet neither Naithani nor the enchanted readers of this engrossing collection can regret Chaube's participation, or imagine that he himself was not committed to its production as a work of enduring relevance and value.

References

REFERENCE CITED

FRERE, Mary

2002 Old Deccan Days or Hindoo Faiiy Legends. Edited and with an Introduction by Kirin Narayan. ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.