ফোক-টেলস্‌ অভ বেঙ্গল

by Lal Behari Day, সাযযাদ কাদির (Translator)

A collection of Bengali folk tales with 32 color illustrations by Warwick Goble.

Genres: Short Stories, Fairy Tales, India, Folklore, Folk Tales, Fantasy, Asia

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1883

About the author

Reverend Lal Behari Dey (Bengali: লাল বিহারী দে; also transliterated as Lal Behari Day) (18 December 1824 – 28 October 1892) was a Bengali Indian journalist, who converted to Christianity, and became a Christian missionary himself.

Reviews

[Samichtime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great stories and pictures, this slaps for 1883 and has no duds! I'm rounding up my rating to a 5 because the better stories are also more memorable. Here's the individual ratings I gave each short story:

Life's Secret: 4
Phakir Chand: 4
The Indigent Brahman: 4
The Story of Rakshasas: 5, this was an epic horror
Swet Basanta: 3
The Evil Eye of Sani: 5
The Boy Who Seven Mothers Suckled: 3.5
The Story of Prince of Sobur: 4
The Origin of Opium: 6!
Strike, but Hear: 4
The Adventure of Two Thieves and Their Sons: 4
The Ghost Brahman: 4
The Man Who Wished to be Perfect: 3.5, reminds me of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
A Ghostly Wife: 3
The Story of Brahmadaitya: 4, unique take on the behaviour of ghosts
The Story of a Hiraman: 5, very wild and classic story
The Origin of Rubies: 4
The Matchmaking Jackal: 5, very unique and fantastic story
The Boy with the Moon on his Forehead: 3.5, too similar to the Story of Rakshasas imo
The Ghost who was Afraid of Being Bagged: 4.5, very funny ghost/bedtime story
The Field of Bones: 5, solid. This could be expanded to a novel like people have done w/ House of Usher by Poe.
The Bald Wife: 5, the story and picture are epic, this was a great way to end the book!


4.2 is the average of my ratings of these stories for anyone wondering.

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sir Richard Carnac Temple, a British India administrator, inspired Lal Behari Dey to draft an amalgamation of those unwritten stories that old women in India recited to little children in the evenings. The author, in his boyhood, heard hundreds if not thousands of fairy tales from a woman known only as Sambhu’s mama. But unfortunately, he had forgotten most of them. The author then began his quest to find others who may bless him with oral treasures.

A Bengali Christian woman, an old barber, an old servant & a couple of old brahmans narrated a few stories. None of them knew English as they were only literate in Bengali. The author translated all the treasures into English & thus, we have this book with 32 colour illustrations by Warwick Goble. I am attaching a sample illustration below. All of them are so gorgeous that I had a hard time settling on one!

The jackal ... opened his bundle of betel-leaves, put some into his mouth, and began chewing them

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic collection of tales told simply, and illlustrated gorgeously.
Reverend Dey's lucid prose gives these rural tales a sheen that provides them with a fable-like quality. Warwick Goble's illustrations added to this. As a matter of fact, these tales— despite being predecessors of 'Thakurmar Jhuli'— appear more in-sync with modern times and style than the latter ones.
Highly recommended.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this at the same time as Indian Fairy Tales -- some comparisons included.

A number of these will be recognizable to readers familar with European fairy tales as tale types, but little more than that. The differences are plentiful, of which the easiest to note is that the kings habitually have more than one wife, which sometimes goes well and sometimes badly. Indeed, only one tale is recognizable as a tale known in modern pop culture; "The Match-making Jackal" is a form of "Puss In Boots."

Some of the stuff has been translated idiomatically, though less than in Jacobs's; he, for instance, has a number of Rakshasas. Both he and Jacobs have a story about The Boy with the Moon on his Forehead, but though you can recognize the common type, it's not the same tale.


I particularly liked "The Story of the Rakshasas", "Life's Secret," and "The Bald Wife." I also liked "The Story of Prince Sobur" though I think it helped that I read a variant of it before, because when the father, King Lear like, goes to ask his daughters, "By whose fortune do you get your living?" I knew that by "fortune" was meant "fate" or "destiny."

[Timothy Green · Rating 2 out of 5]

“There was once a king who had a son. This king had multiple wives - probably, one of which was inevitably evil. Over time the evil wife - who may or may not be a demon - comes between the son and father and eventually drives the son away from home. The son - probably - flees to some other kingdom and encounters some fantastical, magical phenomenon while in exile, changing his fortune for the better. He inevitably crosses path with some woman/girl - usually girl- with out of this world beauty. They quickly fall in love and get married. Something probably happens making the son return to his paternal kingdom where he slays the evil step-mum. THE END”... Or so goes just about every story in this collection. As an individual story, fine, but when each story just becomes some variation of this general format things get tiresome - especially when what you were really hoping for was some allegory/proverb type stories! Alas, a disappointment.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately I did not enjoy this book. It is a collection of folk tales collected and then written in English. Collections of stories are hard for me to rate and review, some are great and some less than than. I felt that too many of these folktales were too similar or too hard to follow. Although, with all of them I could imagine a grandparent telling the stories to the listening ears of their grandchildren.

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the illustrations. Some of the wording felt a bit weird, but the Hindu mythology was super interesting.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mission 2026: Binge reviewing all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review back when I read them

Lal Behari Day’s Folk Tales of Bengal occupies a curious and important place in the landscape of folklore studies. It is both a product of colonial modernity and an act of cultural preservation undertaken with genuine affection and urgency.

Returning to this book now, long after first encountering it, I read it with a double consciousness: as a reader grateful for the survival of these stories, and as a reader acutely aware of the historical moment that shaped how they were collected, translated, and framed. That tension — between recovery and mediation — gives the book much of its enduring power.

What strikes immediately is the imaginative density of Bengali folk narrative. These tales are crowded with talking animals, clever wives, foolish kings, demons with bureaucratic habits, gods who intervene casually, and humans who survive through wit rather than strength. The moral universe is fluid, situational, and often delightfully irreverent. Authority is mocked as frequently as it is obeyed. Intelligence, especially verbal intelligence, is prized above all else. Reading these stories consecutively, one senses a culture deeply aware of hierarchy yet endlessly inventive in negotiating it.

Day’s prose is plain, almost austere, and this works in the book’s favour. He does not attempt to embellish the tales with literary flourish. His translations aim for clarity rather than ornamentation, allowing the narrative logic of the stories to remain visible. At times, the language feels slightly stiff, a reminder that these stories have travelled from oral Bengali into Victorian English. Yet that stiffness also preserves a certain strangeness. The tales are not smoothed into familiar Western rhythms; they retain their sharp edges and abrupt turns.

One of the most compelling aspects of Bengali folk tales is their comfort with contradiction. Gods can be benevolent in one story and absurdly petty in another. Demons are terrifying yet laughably gullible. Humans are morally inconsistent without being condemned. These stories do not insist on moral purity. They insist on adaptability. Survival depends on reading situations accurately, speaking cleverly, and knowing when to bend rules rather than break them outright.

Women in these tales are particularly striking. Far from being passive figures, they are often the sharpest minds in the room. Clever daughters outwit tyrants. Wives rescue foolish husbands. Old women manipulate events from the margins with quiet authority. While patriarchal structures are clearly present, the narrative sympathy frequently lies with female intelligence rather than male power. Day records this without comment and, in doing so, allows the stories to challenge simplistic assumptions about “traditional” gender roles.

There is also a distinctive humour running through these tales — dry, ironic, sometimes bordering on the absurd. Kings issue foolish decrees. Brahmins are outsmarted by peasants. Gods are tricked by mortals who understand human psychology better than divine expectation. This humour is not merely entertainment; it is a social instrument. It exposes the gap between authority and wisdom, between status and competence. In a society structured by rigid hierarchies, laughter becomes a form of critique.

The supernatural in Bengali folk tales feels intimate rather than awe-inspiring. Ghosts haunt familiar spaces. Deities intervene in domestic affairs. Magic is woven into daily life without ceremony. This proximity between the ordinary and the extraordinary gives the stories a distinctive texture. The world is not divided into sacred and profane realms; it is continuous, porous, and unpredictable. Day’s collection preserves this worldview without attempting to rationalise it.

Reading Folk Tales of Bengal alongside other Indian narrative traditions — the epics, the Puranas, the Panchatantra — highlights how regional folk culture both overlaps with and diverges from classical texts. The moral didacticism of the Panchatantra is present, but softened by irony. The cosmic seriousness of the epics is replaced by a more domestic, improvisational logic. These are stories told not to explain the universe, but to navigate everyday life within it.

At the same time, the colonial context of the book cannot be ignored. Day was writing for an English-reading audience, and his framing reflects the intellectual currents of his time. There is an implicit assumption that these tales need to be preserved because they are at risk — an assumption that is both accurate and revealing. Modernity, education, and urbanisation were already reshaping Bengali society when Day wrote, and his work carries the urgency of salvage ethnography. This gives the book a faint undertone of melancholy, even when the stories themselves are playful.

What makes Day’s collection endure despite these limitations is his evident respect for the material. He does not present Bengali folklore as primitive or childish. He treats it as a serious expression of collective intelligence. His introductions and notes, while dated in places, are earnest attempts to situate these stories within a broader cultural framework rather than dismiss them as curiosities.

Nature plays a significant role in these tales, not as an abstract symbol but as a lived environment. Rivers flood, forests conceal danger, and animals act with agency. The natural world is neither romanticised nor feared excessively; it is negotiated. This ecological embeddedness feels especially resonant now, in an era where such negotiated coexistence has largely been replaced by extraction and control.

What moved me most on rereading was the sense of continuity these tales provide. Despite historical upheavals, political transformations, and cultural shifts, the imaginative strategies on display here remain recognisable. The pleasure in cleverness, the scepticism toward authority, the delight in narrative reversal — these are not relics. They persist in contemporary Bengali culture, in humour, conversation, and everyday storytelling.

Folk Tales of Bengal is not a perfect book. Its translations are uneven. Its framing is historically constrained. Yet its importance is undeniable. Without works like this, entire imaginative worlds would have vanished without trace. Day’s collection preserves not just stories, but ways of thinking — flexible, ironic, communal ways of engaging with power, fate, and desire.

Returning to this book now, I did not read it for authenticity in some pure sense. I read it for continuity. These tales remind us that culture does not survive through monuments alone, but through narrative habits passed quietly from one generation to the next. They show us a society thinking aloud, laughing at itself, arguing with its gods, and finding dignity not in certainty but in clever survival.

In the end, Folk Tales of Bengal remains valuable not because it captures a frozen past, but because it reveals how storytelling functions as a tool for living. It teaches us that imagination, when shared, becomes a form of resilience. And that lesson, quietly embedded in these deceptively simple tales, feels as urgent now as it must have when Lal Behari Day first set them down.

A timeless classic. Most recommended.

[Urvashi Pahwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting collection of short stories - full of kings, magical vehicles, poor brahmins, and rakshas.
If you loved the tales in your childhood, these will just help you revisit that world
One bad thing about the book is that some tales are repetitive. A segment can appear in multiple stories - eg a girl is enslaved by 300 rakshas and they can die if someone kills a set of bees who live inside a tank. This same theory appears in two stories.
Similarly many scenes appear in multiple stories.

[shehzad irani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Evidently, an old book of times gone by and when memories served men better and legends intertwined with teachings, ideas and characters from lives - real and virtual.

These stories are quite outdated and i don't think this generation is ever going to sit around bonfires and listen to them with credible attention, but well i was always a sucker for fairy tales. :D

[Dipika Bangera · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first book I read was most probably a fairy tale. I read this book to explore mire such stories but I realised I have outgrown them. I don't think today's kids of the internet generation will also read such books.Times have changed and so have we.

[Radhika Suryavanshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always a sucker for folk tales! This book surprises but keeps you engaged with it's storytelling and simplicity.

[Lisioł Czyta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opowieści ludowe Lisioła
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Tym razem Lisioła poniosło aż do Bengalu w poszukiwaniu wiedzy, bo kto futrzakowi zabroni? Zwłaszcza, gdy pod łapką są „Opowieści ludowe Bengalu” autorstwa Lal Behari Day. Będzie to nie lada wyprawa w odległe krainy, jednak dla zagubionych przygotowano ponad 20-stronicowe wprowadzenie historyczno-kulturowe *Lisioł z zadowoleniem kiwa łebkiem*. W środku czekają na Was 22 opowiadania, więc jest co czytać.
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I tak Lisioł włamał się do grobowca zmarłego księcia, żeby objadać jego zapasy jedzenia. Gorzej, że rzekomy zmarły zaczął wstawać nocą i podpijać legalnie ukradziony przez futrzaka alkohol, skandal! Wziął nawet ślub – nie z Lisiołem!Ciekawe rozwiązanie, nocą dziewczyna ma męża, a za dnia trupa. Dlatego lepiej zawczasu wiedzieć, w co można się wpakować. W tym celu można podsłuchać rozmowę dwóch wścibskich ptaków – Bihangama i Bihangami – które lubią plotkować o tym, kto jak zginie w najbliższym czasie. Lisioł z zaciekawieniem patrzył, jak przyjaciel innego już księcia uwija się jak w dobrej komedii, chcąc ocalić przyjacielowi życie. Z boku wygląda to, jakby facet oszalał. Wyjada księciu z talerza głowę ryby, zakrada mu się do alkowy, chce jechać na jego słoniu… czy to może skończyć się dobrze?
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Gdy spotkacie bogaty pałac otoczony stożkami pieniędzy, a z wnętrza zacznie was nawoływać piękna niewiasta, nazywając „mężem”, toLisioł już węszy obecność głodnego demona. Surowe mięso (ludzie w nomenklaturze demonów)najłatwiej łowi się na bogactwo. Lisioł przestrzega Was też przed zamykaniem jajek w szafie. Może Wam z tego wyjść nieproszona lokatorka, podjadająca jedzenie paluchami, aż strach pomyśleć co by było, gdyby dostała się do lisiego barku!
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Jeśli dobrze poszukacie a Lakszmi – bogini szczęścia i pomyślności uśmiechnie się do Was –trafić możecie na krowę Kapila. Wtedy należy grzecznie wypić jej mleko, następnie poczekać aż załatwi swoje sprawy. Odchody tejże krowy zamieniają się w złoto, a nim stwardnieją, warto je uformować w sztabkę – będzie wygodniej nosić niż placek.
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Z książki dowiecie się znacznie więcej, dlatego Lisioł gorąco zachęca do lektury. Opowiadania są napisane lekkim i przyjemnym językiem. Jednym piśnięciem – warto.

[Sundarraj Kaushik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read for someone not used to the Bengali folk tales.

The tales have some repeated themes like the ogre or someone kidnapping princess and making them sleep by tapping with a silver wand and waking them up with a gold wand and few more.

One may have read some stories like the boy with the moon on forehead and stars in the palm in the Amar Chitra Kathas. I remembered having read it. There are many others which I have not read.

On the whole a decent read though there is nothing Bengali about this. Similar folk tales exist in most Indian folklore.

[Madhulika Liddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lal Behari Day prefaces this collection of stories with a bit of nostalgia: as a child, he was told hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of folk tales by an old woman who was known as ‘Shambhu’s Mother’. Years later, Day set out to try and compile those stories, only to find that storytellers like the long-dead Shambhu’s Mother seemed to have died out. But some perseverance, and he built up, from various sources, this collection.
Twenty-two stories form Folktales of Bengal: some (especially in the second half of the book) are fairly short and simple, just a few pages long. Others go on and on, spreading across generations of people, with convoluted plots that often seem to begin with one sub-plot, end it, and then go on to a mostly unrelated sub-plot featuring one or more of the same characters, and so on.
There are everyday people here, as well as kings and queens, princes and princelings, andmythological creatures, all the way from Rakshasis to Brahmadityas, to ghosts, to hiraman parrots, to pakshiraje flying horses and birds called bihangama and bihangami, the ‘hot and fresh ordure’ of whose chicks has magical healing properties—and which themselves have prophetic powers. There are some recurring motifs too, like the seemingly dead beauty lying with one golden rod and one silver one beside her, the rods being used to arouse her from her stupor and send her back into it, respectively. There are people (and Rakshasas and Rakshasis) whose lives lie in something completely unrelated.
I found these tales enjoyable: they were interesting, some showed a sense of humour, and there was a joyous unreal escapism about them that was beguiling. Lal Behari Day’s writing is mostly pretty readable, though he does occasionally slip into some odd usages of words (cowboys to describe ‘cow-herds’ or shampooing legs for what sounds like ‘massaging legs’ are examples).