Week 13 Extra Reading Diary: Folktales of Bengal part 2

Story source:Folk-Tales of Bengal by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with illustrations by Warwick Goble (1912).

I'm going to write about two stories that were very similar in this unit (Folktales of Bengal part 2): The Ghost-Brahman and A Ghostly Wife. In these two tales, a ghost poses as one of the characters and lives as if it were them until it gets caught.

In the first story, a Brahman is too pore to afford a wife so he begs for the money until he can afford one. Once he marries her, he moves her in with her mother but doesn't stay with them because he really can't afford to support all three of them, so he leaves. Later a ghost takes his place and nobody can tell the difference. The Brahman comes back but people call him an impostor and banish him from his own house. He goes to the king, asking for help. The king agrees to try the case but he can't tell the ghost from the real man either. The Brahman is distraught until he finds another king who comes up with a plan. He comes in and says the real Brahman is the one who can fit inside the very small container. The ghost is tricked and gets into the container, showing that he is, indeed, a ghost. The ghost-Brahman is then thrown out and the real Brahman is reinstated in his family.

In the second story, a young wife marries a Brahman and moves in with him and his mother (I'm sensing a theme here...). One day she offends a ghost who almost strangles her and then traps her in a hole in a tree and takes her shape (another theme?), rejoining her family. The mother notices that something is amiss with the wife (aha, a difference!) and watches her very closely. She sees her stretch her arm out too far one day and tells the Brahman, and then they both watch her closely. The wife does some more ghostly things, like lighting the stove with her foot, and someone is called in to perform an exorcism and he gets the ghost to admit what she's done to the wife and then exorcises her. They rescue the wife just in time and return her to her family.

Week 13 Reading Diary B: Khasi Folktales part 2

(tiger from wikipedia)

Now I'm going to write about the next half of the Khasi Folktales and focus on How the Tiger Got His Strength. I chose this story as my favorite because I love learning about tigers as they are my favorite animal and I thought maybe I could retell it for my story this week. Ok so, in the beginning all of the animals were created equal, but this led to some problems as they were always fighting about everything. So the gods got together and decided that to fix this problem they would give specific animals different specific gifts so as to separate them and maybe make them live more harmoniously. So all the animals were gathered and the gifts were handed out. Men got the gifts of beauty and wisdom and tigers got the gifts of craftiness and the ability to walk silently. When the man got home that night though, the mother sent him back to the gods to ask for strength so that they'd be at the top of the food chain. The man did but was told to come back in the morning. The tiger overheard this and because he was so crafty he was able to come up with a plan to get the strength for himself. The next morning, before man was even awake, the tiger sent a messenger to receive the gift for himself. The gods, thinking they were bestowing strength upon man, gave him 12 times the normal strength. Later the man woke up and headed for the gods, but the tiger intercepted him and challenged him, telling him about getting the man's gift. The man dodged the tiger's attack and ran to tell the gods what had happened. They were dismayed but didn't know how to fix it, so they gave man skill with a bow and arrow instead so that he could hunt the tiger.

Week 13 Reading Diary A: Khasi Folktales part 1

(snail)

Today I'm going to write about my favorite of the first half of the Khasi Folktales, The Stag and the Snail. I liked this particular reading because it reminded me of the story of the hair and the turtle in our own folktales. In this folktale, the stag is bragging to the snail that he is much faster and the snail points out that that may be true but at least she isn't all sweaty. Well the snail ends up challenging the stag to a long race to prove herself to the other animals and they set it for the next day. Her family decides to help her win the race when she goes home that night and tells them all about it, so they all split up and go to different parts of the trail and hide. The next day the snail takes off her shell and they start the race, her moving at a slow and steady speed and him moving very quickly. After a time, he stops and looks back but can't see her because of the grass and her being so tiny, but he's sure she hasn't caught up to him, so he calls back to her but heard a voice from right under him cry out "I am here, I am here!" He was so shocked that she had caught up that he takes off running even faster this time, and the next time he stops it happens again. This continued on and by the end of the race the stag was all out of energy from running so fast that he had to stop and rest, and the snail won! The stag was so upset by this that he coughed up his gallbladder and to this day he doesn't have a gallbladder in reminder of the shame of losing to a snail.