Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales

by Kirin Narayan, Kirin Narayan

Here are the twenty-one stories that Urmilaji told. On her instruction, I have divided the stories into two broad sets: tales associated with various women's rituals and tales for entertainment on long, cold winter nights.

From the back cover:
"Oral tales establish relationships between storytellers and their listeners. Yet most printed collections of folktales contain only stories, stripped of the human contexts in which they are told. In this innovative book, Indian-American anthropologist Kirin Narayan reproduced twenty-one folktales narrated in a mountain dialect by a middle-aged Indian village woman, Urmila Devi Sood, or "Urmilaji." In dialogue with Kirin Narayan, Urmilaji Sood supplements her tales with interpretations of the wisdom that she perceives in them. In turn, Kirin Narayan sets these tales within a larger story about the joys and ironies of undertaking research in a village that is also home to her American mother.
These narratives serve as both moral instruction and as beguiling entertainment. As mass-media floods across rural India, Urmilaji Sood reaffirms the value of tales that have been told and retold across generations. As she says, "Television can't teach you these things!" The first set of tales celebrate women's ritual powers: a washerwoman who brings the dead to life, a female weevil who observes fasts for a better rebirth, and a queen whose worship transforms mud into gold. The second set of tales describe the adventures of such characters as a princess married to a lion and a boy who God splits into two selves.
Set evocatively amid the changing seasons in a Himalayan foothill village, the pathbreaking book draws a moving portrait of an accomplished woman storyteller. Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon offers a window into changing rural India and explores the significance of oral storytelling in nurturing human ties."

Genres: Folklore

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Kirin Narayan was born in India to an American mother and Indian father, and moved to the United States to attend college. As a graduate student, she studied cultural anthropology and folklore at the University of California—Berkeley, writing a dissertation on storytelling as a form of religious teaching through an ethnography of a Hindu holy man in Western India who often communicated teachings through vivid folk narratives. The book that resulted, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989), won the first Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society. She then wrote a novel, Love, Stars and All That (1994) that was included in the Barnes and Nobles Discover Great New Writers program. In the course of researching women’s oral traditions in Kangra, Northwest Himalayas, she collaborated with Urmila Devi Sood to bring together a book of tales in the local dialect with discussions of their meaning and ethnographic context in Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997). An interest in family stories and diasporic experience inspired her to write My Family and Other Saints<?i> (2007), a memoir about spiritual quests. Her most recent book is Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012).

Kirin Narayan has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the School of American Research, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. She received a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. Since 2001, she has served as an editor for the Series in Contemporary Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She currently serves on the Committee of Selection for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

(from https://researchers.anu.edu.au/resear...)

Reviews

[Jieun Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to know of Narayan and her books from the summer course, Narrative Inquiry this year and noticed she evoked certain feelings and memories of my childhood entangled with my family and neighborhood, which makes me wonder about untold stories that were deeply embedded in my identities. Balancing the relationship with Urmalaji and listening to their song, folktale and stories, Narayan draws on the value of silenced voices of women in different societies and makes an attempt to see "gender issues" through the intersectionality with other relations of power, gender, class, and so forth. I couldn't help but reading her book as reflecting what she writes: "Her time was at least partially structured by the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rituals that would please assorted deities and contribute to the well-being of her family."

[Patrick Stout · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fairly well written book. The stories were AMAZING, but I really didn't appreciate all of the focus the author placed upon himself. It is a compendium of folk tales! Let the stories speak for themselves as far as I'm concerned. Still, the folklore is fantastic.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun collection of folktales as shared through oral tradition with the author.