Bengali folklore

The essential traits of the Dharma cult are grounded in the folklore of the agricultural people of Rarh (West Bengal). The annual worship of Dharma, the gajan, is here examined on a gender basis. By considering fertility as the leitmotif of the cult and Dharma worship the masculinization of an ancestral female cult, I shall focus on the presence of blood as the discriminator in ritual acts. I argue that while female devotees foster and care for the deity by virtue of their own body, men are in a position of 'guiltiness' and they must ritually become women. Thus the two intruding acts par excellence (ploughing the soil and sexual intercourse) are ritually replaced by piercing men's flesh. Self-tortures and immolation will be discussed in order to examine the gajan as the dramatic representation of the hierogamy among Bengali agricultural people.

Folktales have been a dynamic part of society, in the sense that social movements and political structures have found simultaneous representation in the contemporary folktales. This paper tries to read a specific aspect of Thakurma'r Jhuli, one of the most prominent texts of Bengali folklore written in pre-independent India: the aspect of travel as the frame narrative of many stories. Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar"s Thakurma'r Jhuli, in spite of being one of the most well-documented collection of Bengali folktales, has very little research space to suffice for the vast and dynamic tradition of folklore that forms the spine of Bengali literary context. Arnold van Gennep"s "Rites of Passage" and contemporary concepts of Grand Tour have been used to study this text from a post-colonial perspective, in order to identify this text within the contemporary research genres of tourism, pilgrimage and travel studies.

"The paper describes the concluding rite of the gajan, a major hierogamic celebration of West Bengal. The night before the end of the festival, ascetic devotees dance with rotten human corpses and human heads in honour of Dharma Thakur, a local fertility deity. After giving a description of the ritual, I try to enlighten the relation between the fertility leitmotif of the gajan and its climax: the danse macabre (dance of death). The practice of sporting with corpses and their ritual beheading will be analysed by furnishing a psychoanalytical and cross-cultural interpretation. In order to do that, it will be suggested that the
ritual behaviour of Dharma’s devotees is due to the gender modification of the actual recipient of the service. Only if we accept that the object of worship is female (the Goddess, Dharma’s spouse), will it be possible to explain the psychical crises occurring to male devotees and their efforts to become ‘ritual women’. The paradigm of the ‘guilty male’ of agricultural societies will be further analysed by comparing the Bengali mar:a¯ khela¯ (playing with corpses) with similar practices within different cultural environments, including Sanskrit Puranic lore, Greek mythology and Italian popular Catholicism."

Bengal has a rich heritage of folk games played in different versions in various regions. Most of these games are played by children and have rhymes associated with those With the changing scenario of globalization affecting the country these games are at the verge of being obsolete from the cultural context. It is known that anything that does not serve the need and function is bound to be obsolete but such is not the case with the Folk games of Bengal. The paper will discuss the International Play Theory and criticize those. But the paper will focus mainly on how the Folk Games of Bengal reflects characteristics of different theories of International play. While establishing this, folk games like Hadudu, Kumir-Danga, Eladin- Beladin, Gaadi, Kusti, Gachhua etc. will be employed. Along with this, the paper will also concentrate on how William R. Bascom’s “Four Functions of Folklore” has been justified through these folk games of Bengal.

Muhammad Mansuruddin (31 January 1904 – 19 September 1987) has been regarded as the founding father of Bengali folklore collection and research. He was famous for a huge collection of age-old folk songs, mostly anthologised in thirteen volumes under the title Haramoni. In recognition of his lifelong contribution to folklore collection and research, the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, India awarded him honorary D.Litt. degree in 1987. Mansuruddin had his baptism in writing at a very early stage of his life. Although collection of folklore remains his monumental work, he also wrote literary essays and fiction all through his life. In 1952 he worked as editor of monthly literary Mah-e Nau for about six months (on deputation from government service). He spent fifty to sixty years in collecting Ethnic and traditional festival Songs from rural Bengal. He transcribed those without caring for lexical accuracy. He took down as he heard from the mouth of the singers. He also collected songs of Lalon Fakir and wrote on him. Also, in 1974, he translated some songs of Lalon Fakir for the international audience. A mentor of outstanding calibre Prof. Mansuruddin encouraged younger folklorists to follow international technic and methodology of folklore. At the same time he advised folklore researchers to travel to the rural areas to look for their context it. Apart from Haramoni (ÔnvivgwYÕ), his notable collection were Lalon Fakir-er Gaan : Songs of Lalan Fakir, published in 1948, Lalan Geetika (Ôjvjb MxwZKvÕ) published subsequently and Folksongs of Lalan Shah in English rendering was published in 1974. Introduction of different volumes of Haramoni are revealing and educative. A literary biographer, Prof. Mansuruddin wrote a biography of prophet Muhammad titled Hazrat Muhammader Jiboni O Sadhona, and his other contribution in this genre include Hazrat Shah Waliullah, Harun Rashid and Iraner Kobi. His books for children included Bokami (1952), Thokami (1958) and Mushkil Ahsan (1958). He compiled a dictionary of Bengali idioms under the title Hashir Ovidhan in 1957.