The Emergence of Rupkatha as a Literary Genre in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Bengal: A Historical Enquiry

Amrita Chakraborty

This paper seeks to study the emergence of the Bengali rupkatha as a literary genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It explores the historical circumstances and cultural phenomena that led to the development of the genre and shaped the popular ideas associated with it. Acknowledging that every genre has a history, that genres in practice arise, change and decline because of historical reasons and that genre concepts do not exist independently but in an inter-related manner within a system of genres (Cohen 206), this paper intends to be a case study of the rupkatha, which as a literary genre made an appearance at a critical juncture of South Asian history and was shaped by the intellectual, cultural and political forces of the time and its milieu.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, Bengal witnessed the publication of volumes containing stories drawn from oral storytelling traditions. The oral storytelling traditions in the region had been a living, continuous tradition that dated back to hundreds of years. There were also ancient literary texts such as the Pali Jatakas, and the Sanskrit Panchatantra, Hitopodesha, Katha Sarit Sagar and Brihat Katha Manjari, which contained stories that had in turn entered into the oral traditions of the region. However it was only in the colonial period that a large scale literary engagement with Bengali oral stories occurred. The very first attempts at writing these stories were undertaken by British administrators, colonial Indologists and their often-unmentioned native assistants.

The first major writer of Bengali oral tales was D. H. Damant, the Deputy Commissioner of Rangpur. He contributed a number of tales to several volumes of the journal the Indian Antiquary between 1872 and 1880 under the title “Tales from Dinajpur”. A young English girl Maive Stokes, daughter of an English administrator, also published a volume titled Indian Fairytales (1879) which contained stories collected from her Bengali servants. Indigenous efforts at writing stories gained steam in the last two decades of the nineteenth century which is also when “rupkatha” as a literary genre emerged. The first native Bengali collector to publish a volume of stories drawn from oral tradition was Reverend Lal Behari Day, who published Folktales of Bengal in 1883. He was publishing in response to a request by the noted British Indologist Richard Carnac Temple, and dedicated his volume to Temple. This collection appeared in English and was followed by a number of other collectors who duplicated Day’s style; for example, Sirish Chandra Basu’s 1908 volume Folktales of Hindustan.

The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth also saw the growth of an intellectual discourse around these story-telling traditions which were actively thrust to the forefront by the rise of Indian nationalism and the Swadeshi movement in Bengal. Publishing of rupkatha stories became a political act aimed at challenging the hegemony of British colonial education system and its impact upon the children of the literate classes. This phase witnessed the pioneering work of Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar who published in colloquial Bengali two collections containing tales drawn from oral sources, Thakurmar Jhuli (1907) and Thakurdadar Jhuli (1909). Both the volumes have remained landmark texts in the history of Bengali print publication. The early decades of the twentieth century also witnessed work by women writers: Sovana Sundari Devi’s The Orient Pearls published in 1915 and Maharani Suniti Devi’s Indian Fairytales published in 1923. They belonged to two of the most reputed Brahmo families of the time and were the quintessential new women of the early twentieth century.

Extremely important to the publication history of stories based on Bengali oral storytelling tradition was the influence of the British colonizers and the impact of western fairytales particularly those that were based on oral traditions themselves. The Romantic Movement in Europe had generated a renewed interest in folklore, folktales and fairytales a century earlier. Romanticism had generated an appeal for places in remote time and place and an energetic interest for fairytales, ballads and romances. The crowning moment of this spirit as far as folk and fairytales were concerned, was the publication of the Kinder und Hausmärchen by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1812 (Vol 1) and 1814 (Vol2). The Grimm brothers, deeply influenced by the German Romantics Herder and Schelling, would devote a lot of their scholarly efforts during their lifetime to developing and revising this masterpiece. Although the history of literary collections of fairy stories dates back to sixteenth century Italy and journeys through seventeenth century French parlours before making its way to Germany, the publication of the Kinder und Hausmärchen was a watershed moment because the “Brothers were among the first scholars to recall and establish the historical tradition of ‘authentic’ folktales that stemmed from oral storytelling” (Zipes, Grimm Legacies 2). The works of Basile, Straparola, Perrault, Madame D’ Aulnoy were literary creations that never claimed authenticity as literary transcribing of oral storytelling traditions.

The Grimm brothers’ collection met with immediate success and subsequently had a huge impact on later collectors in Europe as well as the rest of the world. The nineteenth century British collectors carried some of this impulse to India. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the consolidation of India under the British crown, knowledge about the natives was believed to be integral to the smooth running of the empire. Sadhana Naithani notes that, “in this process folklore played an important role because most colonies were predominantly oral cultures. Orality became the source of all kinds of writing on the colonized” (Naithani 5). A number of writers of stories based on Bengali oral stories were thus men who held British administrative positions in India. Along with the Christian missionaries these men were instrumental in inspiring native Bhadroloks into taking up the task of collecting Bengali folktales. A number of native collectors, notably Rev. Day and Basu directly mentioned the Grimm Brothers and the British colonial collectors as influences behind their efforts. Other native collectors, notably those writing during the period of the Swadeshi awakening in Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century produced volumes as a reaction to the colonial project. This paper argues that not only did the colonial encounter influence the collection and shape the writing of these literary texts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was also during this time that the genre of rupkatha in its modern signification emerged as a result of these historical forces. As an oral tradition was transformed into a literary tradition, the classifications of the oral traditions underwent a reconfiguration, and a conception of the rupkatha as the Bengali equivalent of the English fairytale was established.

Robert Cohen quotes from Francis Cairns who had pointed out that, “genres are as old as organised societies, and that early genres were classifications in terms of content.” Their functions writes Cohen, was “to aid the listener in making logical connections and distinctions; generic distinctions aided the listener in following oral communications from the poet.” However when oral societies are replaced by a literate society, the reasons for generic classification undergo change (Cohen 206). In late nineteenth century Bengal, it was not the case that Bengali society was transitioning from an oral society to a literate society, but it was a time of great change. A new formal education system under the British colonial influence was rapidly spreading, both through the endeavours of Christian missionaries as well as through the indigenous efforts of the Bhadrolok classes. This also led to the spread of the new curricula that were disseminated in both English and Bengali. The indigenous rupkatha collections published during this time were both written by and targeted at the classes who were the beneficiaries of this colonial education system. While Day, Sovana Sundari Devi, Suniti Devi who wrote and published their collections in English were targeting the Anglophone reading public both within India and in England, Mitra Majumdar, whose books were in Bengali, was writing for the native colonial educated classes. Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote a short prose piece as an introduction to Mitra Majumdar’s Thakurmar Jhuli, refers to the child who is made to read Martin’s Ethics and Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, at the cost of his own traditions and cultural heritage, as the intended reader of the book (Tagore 2). In this transitory phase, when stories that predated the writers by hundreds of years, were written down and published, thus bringing oral stories into literary circulation, the reason for the classification of the stories changed. Classification on the basis of content, no longer remained a priority, rather the determining factor became the status of the stories in reference to the English/European fairytale. Suniti Devi called the stories “Indian Fairytales,” while Day in the introduction to The Folktales of Bengal wrote:

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 about for materials. (Day 1)

Day’s references were particularly to those fairytale/folktale texts that had purported to have been collected from oral storytelling traditions. A number of scholars since the 1970s, have conclusively argued how these texts, particularly the work of the Grimm brothers, were not simple literary transcriptions of oral stories. Specifically, Heinz Rölleke in his 1975 essay “helped debunk the persistent myth that the brothers’ tales were authentic transcriptions of the German folk tradition by demonstrating in convincing detail not only that the Grimms had relied heavily on literary sources and literate middle-class informants, but also that they had undertaken significant editorial interventions in the texts they selected to publish” (Hasse 23). But in the late nineteenth century, these myths about the Brothers’ work had heavily influenced and shaped the work of the writer/collectors of Bengali oral stories.

The tumultuous years that followed the first partition of Bengal in 1905 evoked a new wave of nationalistic feeling among the Bengali intelligentsia who were opposed to such a move. This nationalist phase marked a sharp change in the attitudes of the educated native elite, the bhadroloks, towards folk culture. Long seen as “chhotolok” culture, that is low, ill bread and the binary opposite of the cultivated and refined “bhadrolok” culture, the popular cultural forms derived from the folk¹ were the very antithesis of the culture on which bhadrolok self-identity was built. In fact, one can go as far as to say that it was the very rejection of folk/popular cultural forms as chhotolok culture, in the early to middle nineteenth century, that had helped construct a differential selfhood for the bhadrolok as distinct from and therefore not the chhotolok. This also extended into the purview of language, with the bhadrolok creation of a Bengali language suited for purposes of official communication and education out of the vast number of dialects in use, through a process of refinement and synthesis. Sumanta Banejee has shown how up to the middle of the nineteenth century bhadrolok efforts were directed at purging these folk/popular cultural forms (and linguistic usages) from their homes and from the lives of their women (Banerjee 130). However, by the end of the same century when Bengal was seeped into a fast-emerging nationalist consciousness, this rejection changed into an engagement with the folk and finally into an active association and enquiry into the folk as the uncontaminated heart of national culture. These cultural forms now became something to be studied and collected, and used in the cultural resistance to the British rule alongside the political resistance. There were large-scale Swadeshi efforts at a Bengali cultural revival in general and in reviving the Bengali folk storytelling traditions among the educated upper and middle classes in particular. This set the stage for the publication of literary texts of oral stories, and Tagore became a leading figure in such efforts. An important moment for the bhadrolok reengagement with the folk was Tagore’s “Swadeshi Swamaj” address of 1904. This address ultimately became a clarion call for the project of retrieving and preserving fast eroding indigenous cultural forms. The rupkatha tradition was among those cultural forms. Supriya Goswami, who notes Tagore’s contribution to the field in her study of colonial Indian children’s literature, writes:

Rabindanath Tagore’s validation of folklore— echoing the romantic nationalism of the British Romantic poets who glorified children and the common folk as embodiments of purity and innocence—ignited an interest in compiling Bengali folktales and rhymes. Tagore began collecting folklore from around 1883 (Mukhopadhyay 40), and the establishment of Bangiya Shahitya Parishat (Bengali Literary Council) in 1894 gave him a forum from which to encourage others to do the same...Tagore’s initiatives resulted in a spurt of activity in the editing and publishing of folk songs, folktales and nursery rhymes during this period. (Goswami 138)

Mitra Majumdar’s work which appeared in this phase was framed through the discourses generated by the swadeshi cultural resistance. Thakurmar Jhuli subtitled “Banglar Rupkatha” or Bengal’s rupkatha was projected as the indigenous answer to the western fairytale. Tagore’s introductory essay to Mitra Majumdar’s book itself made the connection between the swadeshi cause and the rupkatha texts. Tagore began the essay with the rhetorical question as to whether there was anything more swadeshi than Thakurmar Jhuli? He then placed the rupkatha texts in opposition to foreign education. The English school curriculum consisting of Martin’s Ethics and Burke’s works was called out for their didacticism, and the English fairytale books for their artificiality. Both were denounced for their role in malnourishing the national child. Tagore recommended giving the child indigenous stories which he called natural and beneficial. This can be read as a continuation of his call for a swadeshi mode of education in the “Swadeshi Samaj” address. He presented a conception of rupkatha stories through a series of binary oppositions: Bengali rupkatha stories versus English fairytales, rupkatha organically created by grandmothers versus English fairytales as the synthetic creation of Manchester mills, and by association rupkatha=swadeshi versus English fairytales=foreign and rupkatha=oral versus English fairytales=literary. Thus, the English fairytale remained the reference point for the definition of the genre of stories that was being published. These nineteenth and early twentieth century categorisation of rupkatha stories demonstrate how genres emerge and exist through interrelations. Robert Cohen writes:

A genre does not exist independently; it arises to compete or to contrast with other genres, to compete, augment or interrelate with other genres. Genres do not exist by themselves; they are named and placed within hierarchies or systems of genres, and each is defined by reference to the system and its members. A genre, therefore, is to be understood in relation to other genres, so that its aims and purposes at a particular time are defined by its interrelation with and differentiation from others. (Cohen 207)

The literary genre of rupkatha that emerged in the late nineteenth century through the hands of writers like Day and Basu were on the one hand contrasting with the genre of western fairytales, since they were aiming to present “Indian” stories that belonged to the same category of tales as collected by western writers and thus added to international scholarly activities. On the other hand, during the Swadeshi phase, rupkatha as a literary genre was competing with English fairytales in an effort to counter their hegemonic dominance over the English educated Bengali upper and middle classes. Now this had some interesting ramifications for the story collections. Writers such as Day who were directly inspired by colonial Indologists concentrated on stories that would correspond to the western märchen tales and fairytales. Therefore, when Day published a collection of stories called Folktales of Bengal, it was mostly a certain kind of stories, oral wonder tales or rupkatha narratives that found place in the volume. Whereas folktales, as a category, whose Bengali translation would be “lok katha” included within it an array of narratives such as the upakatha or animal tales/fables, bratakatha or ritual tales and rupkatha or oral wonder tales. Day excluded both bratakatha narratives as well as animal tales from his stories collection of “folktales.” Western categorisation remained an important reference point for him, and hence he associated the “folktales” that he was writing with fairy tales and märchen. A couple of decades later when Mitra Majumdar published a volume of tales that attempted to counter the widespread popularity that western fairytales had gained in colonial Bengal, he concentrated on stories which he felt were equivalent to the western tales. He identified these stories as rupkatha and the genre of rupkatha was defined as the indigenous equivalent of the western fairytale.

While the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century writers continually stressed on the rupkatha as an oral genre and claimed that their volumes were simple straightforward transcriptions of oral stories, they were in effect creating a literary genre that was distinct from the oral tradition. To begin with, the writing down of oral stories was not a simple and transparent act. The production of the written text is a process that, in itself, requires critical attention. Jack Zipes’s observes that one can see a single fairytale text as a “symbolic act” infused with the ideological viewpoint of the author (Zipes, Fairytales and the Art of Subversion 3). While such a critical enquiry is beyond the scope of this paper, the categorisation of the stories that were selected for publication also set the literary genre apart from its oral counterpart.

Oral genres were defined on the basis of content and in terms of content each of the oral tale genres that belonged to Bengal’s storytelling tradition, that is, the bratakatha, the upakatha and the rupkatha had much in common. They had a common subject matter in human society (Bhattacharya 8). Animal tales or upakatha used animals to talk about humans and social organisation. Oral wonder tales or rupkatha despite its fantastical events and actions, had its foundation in real social issues. And religious elements were not integral to ritual tales or bratakatha, which were also focussed on human relationships and social functioning. This led to a fluidity in the oral tradition which allowed tales to pass from one storytelling genre to another with minor changes. Asutosh Bhattacharya observes that a number of bratakathas that were used for religious rituals had actually been derived from rupkatha and upakathas, and it was quite possible to strip them of their religious elements and reinstate them into rupkathas and upakathas (Bhattacharya 32). Similarly, analysis of a number of rupkathas will reveal them to have been derived from bratakathas (Bhattacharya 14). Thus within the oral tradition genres existed side by side, they grew from one another and provided a flexibility that allowed possibility for stories to easily shift from one genre to another. The stories participated in a genre but were not fixed to it. In his 1966 book Banglar Lok Sahitya Bhattacharya collected and classified stories from Bengali oral traditions which included stories that had been published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century publications, on the basis of their content. In such a classification, rupakatha, upakatha and bratakatha narratives are jumbled under various categories such as stories about miraculous birth, stories about magical action, stories about ghosts, stories about gods, stories about cruelty, stories about stupidity etc. However such fluidity was no longer possible within the literary tradition. Since stories were classified within genres with specific purposes, it was as Jacques Derrida would later state that the genres were determinate, and fixed texts within them, even if the texts could be fixed in other genres (65). Genre classification in the literary tradition gained rigidity since what stories classified as rupkatha was determined in relation to another literary genre.

The construction of the literary genre of rupkatha during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in relation to the English fairytale also had consequences in terms of its location within literary genres in general. It was during this time that the genre came to be recognised as shishu sahitya or children’s literature. This genre itself came into existence under the influence of the vastly popular Victorian English genre of children’s literature. It was Ramendrasundar Tribedi who first coined the phrase shishu sahitya in his extensive introduction to Yogindranath Sarkar’s Khukumanir Chhara (1899), a coinage that went on to become the defining term for a distinct Bengali literary genre. The Bengali oral tradition was never exclusive in terms of its audience and it was never meant to be a children’s genre at all. Asutosh Bhattacharya makes this important observation in his discussion of folk literature where he says that within oral culture, stories of all kinds were aimed at a general audience. Furthermore, an investigation of their themes makes it clear that much of the material that these stories dealt with were beyond the grasp of children. For rupkatha narratives dealt with romantic love, while upakathas talked of life and social philosophy, and bratakathas dealt with common good (Bhattacharya 24). However, in literary circulation rupkatha came to be associated with children. This occurred through dual processes of agreement between the authors with the reader on one hand and the reader and the text on the other.

Northrop Frye had suggested that, “the genre is determined by the conditions established between the poet and his public;” and building on Frye, Fredric Jameson talked about genre as a literary institution and a social contract between a writer and a particular public “whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artefact” (Cohen 208). Now, when the rupkatha was brought forth as a literary genre for the literate classes of Bengal, the discourse generated around the genre by authors and enthusiasts configured the genre as a children’s genre and communicated the same in great detail to the intended readers. Day claimed that he had set out to create “a collection of those unwritten stories which old women in India recite to little children in the evenings” (Day 1). Mitra Majumdar and Tagore in their respective prefaces to Thakurmar Jhuli discussed at length their intended reader as the young child who attended colonial schools and studied a foreign curriculum but was starved of indigenous wonder stories. These stories contributed greatly to the pleasures of childhood that the authors of the essays had been fortunate enough to experience in their childhood. This pleasure was now being denied to the child because the women of the (middle class and upper class) households could no longer tell these stories (Tagore 2-3; Mitra Majumdar 7-9). The extension of this argument was that this sorry state of affairs necessitated intervention in the form of written publications that would set things right by providing children with indigenous stories and ensuring that they remained in cultural memory.

Such sentiments were also echoing the Victorian association of children with fairytales. This association was also present in the myths generated around the work of the Grimm brothers. Jack Zipes writes that the first English translation of the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder und Hausmärchen by Edgar Taylor published in two volumes in 1823 and1826 as German Popular Stories generated some major myths about the work of the Grimm Brothers. One of most significant of these myths was that the tales were intended for children which they were not despite the title of the volume (Zipes, Grimm Legacies xi). In fact, the Brothers had, in their own lifetime, published a heavily edited and censored shorter volume that was aimed at children and was distinct from the Kinder und Hausmärchen. In Victorian England, fairytales sometimes distrusted as pernicious were eventually published en masse for children where the violence and sexual references present in the work of the Grimm Brothers and fairytale writers before them such as Charles Perrault, Madame D’ Aulnoy and Basile were edited out. Tolkien commented on this while maintaining that there was no essential connection between fairytales and children that “the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories in the modern lettered world have been relegated to the ‘nursery’, as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused” (Tolkien 130). Since the British print market impacted the print market of colonial Bengal, English fairytales had become popular reading material for Bengali children of the literate classes. There were also popular translations of English fairytales in Bengali such as Sukholata Rao’s Chhotoder Grimm Brothers. Hence, when rupkatha in literary circulation competed with the English fairytale, it did so as children’s genre.

The literary genre of rupkatha also came to be accepted as children’s literature through the reader’s acceptance of the texts as such. Since, the genre was already defined in relation to the English fairytales popular in the Bengali print market, the readers expectations from the printed rupkatha texts was pre-determined. The texts were also edited with the intended reader in mind. In her book Indian Fairytales, a collection of rupkatha stories, Suniti Devi introduced tropes and conventions that would be familiar to readers of Victorian fairytales, such as fairies as magic helpers of hapless young princesses. Mitra Majumdar, who was writing specifically with a juvenile readership in mind, censored out all references to rape, incest or acts of violence that can be found in other versions of the same stories written by different writers. Dinesh Chandra Sen, who published an extensive comparative study of Mitra Majumdar’s stories in contrast with those of medieval and early modern court poets and writers such as Munshi Mohammad and Golam Kader in his Folk-literature of Bengal, praised the “purity” of Mitra Majumdar’s stories (Sen 132). Sen, however, did not believe them to be the result of censorship, rather he identifies them as an expression of the inherent innocence of Bengali Hindu folk culture. The early twentieth century Bengali reader readily accepted the texts within the prescribed genre definitions. These genre definitions created boundaries that were so deeply etched in the collective consciousness of the readers that anything that were not defined within the limits of these boundaries were left out. A case in point is Mitra Majumdar’s Thakurdadar Jhuli, which, as a collection contained longer oral wonder tales dealing with romantic love did not subsequently remain in Bengali cultural memory as rupkatha, since they were defined by the author and publisher as Bengali oral novels “bongoupanyashkatha.” The stories of Thakurdadar Jhuli were propped up as indigenous oral novels, a Swadeshi challenge no doubt to the foreign genre of the novel that, too, had found ready acceptance in late nineteenth century Bengal. However, upanyashkatha was a synthetic term that did not subsequently remain in common or scholarly usage. The novel originated in Europe as a literary genre, and the stories of Thakurdadar Jhuli were based on oral rupkatha tales. However, within the Bengali print culture, rupkatha has remained a genre for children, and Mitra Majumdar is popularly remembered as a children’s writer. Guiseppe Flora, who studied the nineteenth century intellectual nationalist traditions that were intertwined with the contemporary “fairytale” collections, lamented that Mitra Majumdar’s reputation as a children’s writer overshadowed Mitra Majumdar the scholar. It stood in the way of a proper evaluation of Mitra Majumdar as a folktale scholar (Flora 34).

The emergence of the literary genre of rupkatha in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Bengal occurred at the intersection of Bengal’s colonial encounter and the rise of a nationalist consciousness. This marked a transformation of what existed as part of a popular oral storytelling into a literary genre that entered print circulation. That transformation entailed a reconfiguration of the oral genre into a new literary genre from which emerged the modern conception of rupkatha as part of children’s literature and as the indigenous equivalent of the European fairytale. In the process of reconfiguration, the English fairytale as a literary genre became the reference point for the writers as well as the thinkers who were weaving a discourse around the new genre. The new literary genre was established through an implicit contract between the colonial educated bhadrolok writers, who communicated their conception of the new literary genre, and their literate middle- and upper-class readers, who accepted the concepts. These concepts have remained in circulation within the Bengali literary culture, and have shaped the way subsequent generations of readers and writers have approached, understood and written rupkatha.

Notes

1. Sumanta Banerjee explains the connection of the folk and the popular culture in nineteenth century Bengal saying, “with the decline of the village economy and the beginnings of industry in nineteenth century Bengal, there was a regular exodus of poorer men and women from the countryside to Calcutta…these Bengali villagers bought with them into Calcutta the songs they inherited from rural folk culture (and)…they not only kept alive the old folk culture in the squalor of the growing metropolis of Calcutta, but enriched it with new motifs borrowed from surrounding urban scenes” ( Banerjee 123-130). Guiseppe Flora identified this culture as the “chotalok’s culture” “the culture of the folk migrated from nearby or far off villages, who formed the mass of the city’s lower orders” (Flora 7).

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Amrita Chakraborty

Assistant Professor

Jamalpur Mahavidyalaya

University of Burdwan, India

amritachakraborty1988@gmail.com