 Hello and welcome to the British Library South Asia Seminar Series, which is part of our research and digitization project called Two Centuries of Indian Print. We are very happy to have amongst us today Rahi. Rahi Adho is a doctoral student at the Center for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS London. She has an MFIL in Women's Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and an MA in Women's Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. She researches concepts of childhood, print histories, folk tales, gender and culture. Her work explores how Bengali children's literature was influenced by attitudes to gender and sexuality, print history and anti-colonial movements. Rahi will be speaking to us today on the gender journey of the Rupkatha. We are also very delighted to have Srimoy Das Gupta as the chair for the event. Srimoy is a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh. She has bachelor's and master's degrees in English Literature from Jadupur University Kolkata. She researches on children's literature and childhood studies and is also interested in women's and gender studies, postcolonial studies, literature, 19th century British literature and fantasy literature. She has won the Lola Fellowship for her work on her dissertation Nationalism, Genre and Childhood in Colonial Indian Children's Literature. So about the format of our session today, Rahi will speak to us for about 45 minutes, after which there'll be a short discussion between the speaker and the chair, after which I'll open it up for audience questions. If in the meantime while the talk or the discussion is going on, you would like to put in your questions, please use the Q&A box or the chat box to do so, and I'll take the questions in order during the Q&A session. So without much further ado, I hand it over to Rahi to speak on the gender journey of the Rupkatha. Over to you Rahi. Thank you very, very much for having me here today. And thank you for the introduction. If it's alright, I'll start sharing my screen right away. Right. So the topic of my presentation today as the title suggests is a Bengali literary genre called the Rupkatha, which at least in the form that it is probably remembered in the present day is one that crystallized over the turn of the 20th century in Bengal. Now, this temporal and spatial context is of course very important to how the Rupkatha took shape at this point. This was a time when India was under British colonial rule, but also a time when opposition to various forms of colonial oppression had also been gaining ground. And a key event that truly bolstered this opposition in the Bengal region during this time, for example, was the partition of Bengal in 1905. My slides are not shifting. Can someone tell me if my slides changed because for me it's stuck on the first slide. Rahi, they are stuck on the first slide. I think it's not moving. Okay. Maybe you could stop sharing and start sharing again. I think it changed now, right. Yes, it did. Right. So one event that bolstered this opposition in the Bengal region during this time was the partition of Bengal in 1905. This administrative move made by the then viceroy of India, the Bengal region, which was at this point, you know, a much, much larger area that would include present day West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, Orissa, and Chattisgarh and Assam was divided into two halves, so East and West Bengal. And this was vehemently opposed by a section of the Bengali community that saw this as fanning communal flames, but also because once the western part of Bengal was merged with Bihar, Orissa and Chattisgarh, it would make the Bengalis speaking community a linguistic minority in this region. The movement against the partition and eventually for self rule took the form of calls for a cultural and political boycott of anything that was British. And the promotion of the indigenous as as a part of a new identity that was to challenge colonial hegemony. And this movement was called Shadeshi from the word Shadesh, which means a country of one's own. And I thought that it was important to give this brief history here so that it is easier to understand how charged the region of Bengal was at this time with questions of linguistic and ethnicity, and with finding this authentic culture that unified all Bengalis. And one of the ways in which this translated was through an exercise undertaken mostly by the educated Bengali middle class of collecting material from the countryside, which was seen as somehow untouched by the influence of colonial modernity. And the group, which was oral tales from the countryside, put to print for the urban Bengali middle class child was one of the most popular genres that developed in the process, having even been called the most Shadeshi of all by Nath Tagore. So, the crystallization of the Rupa isn't that sense inseparable from the context and shop and discourse of Shadeshi. However, the association of the Rupa to Shadeshi understood in an endogenous way is amply complicated if we look at the history of the genres crystallization. And the beginnings of this project that is of collecting oral tales and giving them a written form or a or a literary shape can be found in the works of colonial administrators like like G.H. Damont and E.T. Dalton through periodicals like the Indian antiquity or publications like the descriptive ethnology of India. But, as we can probably tell from the titles, these had a decidedly philological or anthropological motive. And in this kind of a timeline of folklore collection, the Bengali writer and journalist Lal Bihari Day holds an important position. In many ways, his anthology titled Folk Tales of Bengal, which was published in 1883 is a prototype of what would crystallize as the Rupatha within a few years after that. And the anthologizer of Thakumar Chuli, which is arguably the most popular anthology of Rupatha, Dukkinaranjan Mitra Mojumdar himself acknowledges his debt today. Now, they actually cites his familiarity with, you know, as the court says the Martian of the Brothers Grimm, Norse tales, Icelandic tales, Highland stories and other fairy tales collected by other writers as the reason why he was well suited to publish an anthology like the Folk Tales of Bengal. So, this points to the fact that methods used in the collection of European folk tales were already familiar to at least a section of scholars in the colonies. In day's own work, this is most apparent through the serialized versions of Folk Tales of Bengal in volumes four to seven of the Bengal magazine, which are of course Bengali tales or Bengali oral tales translated to English by day. And as you can see, narrated by the distinctly French mother Goose. And one of the tales, Pokitcha that I put here, even starts with an excerpt from Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coolridge, the Romantic poet. Additionally, from the mid 1850s, many of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, like the Little Mermaid, the ugly duckling, were translated by the vernacular Literature Society that was trying to mold the taste of the reading public and tapping on to entertaining reads of course and also shorter fiction as opposed to longer forms like the novel in their endeavors. At the same time, the Roopkatha was liberally building on indigenous Bengali narrative or storytelling traditions, like the Kicha or the Gittika. So many of the plots of the Roopkatha, sometimes actually subplot by subplot were already in circulation within regions of Bengal in the form of oral tales or manuscripts or printed books. And we find that the literary genre that we know as the Roopkatha is taking shape. So for example, the Sheet Basantotel, which was in circulation much earlier through Gollum Cathers, Sheet Basantir Kicha or Ramshankar Sharmon's Sheet Basantir Kicha or say the Roopkatha that we know as Patalkonna Muni Mala through Munshi Ayazuddin's Malon Chomala Kicha or through the Gittika or ballads about Moluwa or Devan Bhadna. Right, so it's important to set out this whole constellation of global as well as local influences that informed the Roopkatha so as to not over determine the Roopkatha by Shadeshi as well as colonial religions, which as I will discuss has direct consequences for the way the genre itself became gendered. So implying a discursive gendering, or in the way gender is remembered vis-à-vis the tales of the Roopkatha so therefore a more tangible kind of an effect. And a particular and rather omnipresent figure when it comes to the Roopkatha, who for me has been a useful window into the ways in which the discourse around the Roopkatha was gendered is the figure of the old woman. And those of us familiar with the Roopkatha as a genre will also know how closely the image of the old woman is linked to or our understanding of it. And as this image by an artist called Sharodacharon Ukil, you know it meant to depict a bygone era. And you know this image shows that there was a particular investment in this figure of the old woman at this time in the cultural sphere even beyond the Roopkatha as well. So the titles of many of the collections, yeah, so the titles of many of the collections evoke the figure of the grandmother. So I've put some of the titles up on the slides. And we find folklorists like Dinesh Chandrashen defining the Roopkatha as stories that the grandmothers may be heard to tell, heard to tell their grandchildren every evening in remote villages. While discussing Horinath Mojumdar sanskritized version of Sheet Bhasuntu, which is called Bijoy Bhasuntu, which was published in 1859, Shane's primary accusation is that he quote, altogether conceals the fact that he heard the story originally from the old women of the countryside. On the other hand, Lal Bihari Day, while writing his folk tales of Bengal acknowledges that his endeavor was fueled by Captain R. C. Temples, who was a British military and civil officer in colonial India, and also a folklorist. So his suggestion that tales told by old women in rural Bengal, who he had found difficult to persuade, shared their stories, would be invaluable to the cultural history of the region. So there is a sense that it is inevitably, and obviously these benevolent affectionate and giving old women who best tell these tales, right? However, it was when I read this following account in the preface to Maeve Stokes's Indian fairy tales published in 1879, that I first took a step back and started looking at this association more critically. So I'm not reading the quote out and of course the kind of project being undertaken by someone like Maeve Stokes, who was a British administrator's daughter, and later anthologies of tales collected by Bengali folklorists, you know, they were of course different and I don't mean to conflate the two kinds of projects. But this account documents the multiple nodes of the oral circulation of the tales collected in this book, many of which actually have tropes and plots that reappear in later collections by Bengali folklorists, and that is what is significant. Now, on probing further in the accounts of some of the 19th century Bengali folklorists themselves, I found that actually their engagement with these old women of the countryside was not quite so smooth. So for example, Dinesh Chandrashen wrote about his experience of trying to collect putis from a or a manuscript broadly speaking from a washerwoman's house and being abused by the old woman of the house for his intrusion. This old woman denied knowledge of the putis that that Sen was looking for. And it was a young girl in the family who later revealed that they were indeed in the house. So despite the fact that this anecdote relates to the collection of food papers they are not, you know, not to root quota. It does point towards awareness of old village women towards the increasing flow of urban collectors into their spaces. Further, if you look at this letter written to Tagore by an unnamed collector of rhymes and tales, we see the exasperation of this collector regarding the lack of old women who could provide the required material. So the number of women is very limited and even among them, many do not know any of those rhymes. As a final example, in his biography of Doki Naranjan Mitra Mojandar, this is what Shankar Shen Gupta writes. And again, I'm not reading the quote, but what is interesting is, you know, the, the mathematical precision of how much this old woman was trusted, and the amount of added fiction to make it a quote fully developed story. So, all of these accounts point towards a mistrust towards the knowledges, dialects and memories of the old women of the countryside, even as anthology after anthology invoked this old woman as the ideal teller of tales. So there is an obvious dissonance here. And I think that this symbolic portrayal of the old woman is linked to how the Rupatha, as I was discussing earlier, how the genre has commonly been understood in a way that has been over determined by both romantic nationalists, as well as romantic, you know, mentalist approaches. And this romantic understanding of the Rupatha as a genre, and also romantic notions of homogenous, unified Bengali society is connected to the tendency to take for granted the fact that it was always these, but to me, the figure to ironically be quite elusive helps bring together the connected histories of changing class relations, shifting domestic hierarchies, as well as changing literary practices in the region, along of course with the history of cultural nationalism in the region. And I think that the fish as a natural symbol of Bengali culture and tradition are quite clear in the preface to Thakumar Juli itself. Here, Tagore wrote, open quote, my suggestion is that a school be founded with immediate effect for all the modern grandmothers of Bengal. And with the help of Dukinababu's book, we must restore to them the pride of place that they once held in the dreamland of children. In this formulation, which I think gets more and more complex every time I read it. Tagore entwines the conceptions of old and new womanhood within the standard discourse of female reform through education, so the school, and therefore actually ends up denaturalizing the association of age old wisdom, especially with the old woman. So this modern grandmother then needs to be reformed through modern education into tradition, and you know both modern education and tradition being symbolized by the Rukkotha. And in that sense, the Rukkotha was giving a popular image or a popular birth to the very concept or the idea of tradition or the ancient through the symbolic of the old woman. Some of the other indications of the symbolic importance of this old woman lie in an understanding of how colonial governance was changing social relations in the Bengal region. So this period saw the setting up of missionary schools, the development of the service sector, the creation of many clerical jobs to assist with administrative work, and also the difficulty of setting up large scale entrepreneur entrepreneurial ventures under colonial rule. And this meant that the ownership of property and land was dwindling with the Bengali community, and leading to the consolidation of a Bengali middle class, who are often synonymous to do as the Bhodro lo or the respectable or civilized gentry. At the same time, on the domestic front, there was a breaking up large joint families as was common for land holding classes into smaller nuclear families with independent incomes. And there were also a number of reformist organizations at the time that encouraged companionate marriages, so where the relationship between the husband and the wife, and consequently their child became the primary site of affective ties rather than being diffused over a larger number of extended family members. And importantly, there was a gradual loosening of the control exercised by family elders, and especially that of older women on younger women and children. And in this respect, the opening rime to a collection of Rupata titled Chor Kaburi, so translating to the old woman with the spinning wheel written by the anthologizer, Noni Gopal Chakravorty, is indicative of the Rupata's place within these changing domestic hierarchies. So relevant to my point here is the rationale provided in this rhyme that reads, that is why I have taken the stories out of Chor Kaburi's back and brought them here. Which points towards the very strategic role that this myth of the grandmother played in the soaring popularity of the Rupata. The old woman in this rhyme signifies many things, right, so she signifies the loss of indigenous crafts and the onslaught of industry, she signifies the loss of storytelling traditions, the shrinking of the family. And most importantly, she personifies a lost past and a lost inner self at a time when Indian traditions and cultures were consistently being critiqued under the Western colonial gaze. The old woman, you know, who in some sense is born again and again with every printed Rupata that invokes her became the personification almost of the rebirth of true Bengali culture for the English educated middle class Bengali who felt that he or she had moved away from this supposed authentic culture. So whether or not the collectors actually collected these tales from old women in rural Bengal, the creation of this myth of the old woman storyteller actually fed into a middle class dream of, you know, an idyllic Bengali countryside and fit into a middle class experience of domestic spaces with this imagined, you know, individualized and dedicated storyteller and an individualized child listener in the face of tremendous shifts in the terrain of the family and the household. And with the loosening power of senior women in the household, it was actually a symbolic reorienting of this mythical old woman's attention on two young children that placed the Rupata within the larger politics of the time. So the genre was filling in a gap within the Bengali household, which was also a gap that the genre was itself very careful to repeatedly highlight and widen with every publication, thereby also sealing its own necessity and popularity within this new Bengali household. At the same time, the reclaiming of these timeless and feminized symbols and traditions, while on the one hand was of course a response to the colonial critique of the supposed lack of a sense of history among the colonized. On the other was simultaneously crucial for for convincing the Bengali elite that they had indeed progressed. So, the old woman and ended up symbolizing everything that the modern Bengali middle class elites would judge themselves against, which has important implications for how the collection of folklore was informed by inequalities of not just gender, but also class, religion and age. So therefore the construction of the other as female, as old and timeless, enhanced the understanding of the modern sovereign ideal self as male, as new, as belonging to the present, and as stable. Right, so. So coming now to these to how these socio economic and cultural changes in the region affected gendered characters and concepts within the tales of the Rukkatha themselves, adding now therefore what the element of fantasy and other literary forms had to contribute to this. So I'll zoom into the tales now and bring out how the representations of gendered roles and relations and destinies crystallized within the Rukkatha. And how these tales relate to the gendered expectations of Shadeshi, marked as they were by a conflation of women with expectations of virtue and self restrained, and also with the space of the domestic or the home. And if I had to choose a single tail as an entry point into the many gendered characters and relations that define the Rukkatha, it would probably be the tail Kiron Mala, which is anthologized in Takumar Chuli. So, and all of the woodcut illustrations that I'll show henceforth are from Takumar Chuli itself etched by the anthologizer himself. So, so in this tale, three abandoned babies, Oroon Boroon and Kiron Mala, born originally to a king and queen are found by a priest who brings them up. Now, many years later, Oroon Boroon and Kiron Mala's biological father, so the king, who is on a tour of his kingdom stops by the priest's heart. He's feeling very tired and famished. And we can see him in the background in the picture on the slide. And the siblings give him food, water and shelter. And just as he leaves, it is Kiron Mala, the sister who asks her brothers, quote, what does it take to be a king. And the rest of the tale is about Kiron Mala going to great lengths to procure whatever is needed to become king. Including venturing into Maya Pahar, which is this dangerous, you know, misty mountains to find a few secret ingredients that no man has ever managed to get. At the peak of the mission undertaken by Kiron Mala, the narrator tells us, and I quote, but Kiron Mala is not a prince. Hence, she continued steadfastly. In the end, the three siblings are reunited with their father and they live in the palace, which has been built and animated by Kiron Mala. And I see this particular story as both representative of the several gendered characteristics that Mark the Roopkatha, but also in many ways as exceptional in its use of symbolism and imagery. And in its complex troubling of gendered identities and roles. Like Kiron Mala, many tales in the Roopkatha genre start with an image of domestic harmony, which often entails depicting characters in set gendered roles. So for example, the king rules over his kingdom, the queens remain in the inner quarters or otherwise engaged duties. However, this scene of harmony is invariably short lived and it almost seems like it's performing a perfunctory role in the narrative because it is soon troubled by the introduction of a crisis. And what this crisis invariably does in all of the tales is turn this initial harmonious picture, you know, with all its gendered orderings right on its head. So in Kiron Mala, the eponymous character is a young woman who aspires to be a king. She prepares for a very obviously dangerous mission as calmly as she waters her plants. She saves a number of helpless and paralyzed men, which also points to the almost compulsive launching of male characters in the Roopkatha into spaces that challenge the efficacy of martial masculinity, which is something that I will discuss in a bit more detail in some time. So we find, we find similar young women as driving agents of several Roopkatha like Patalkonda Monimala or Shonarkati Ruparkati or Bhagir Porigach from Rangadidi Roopkatha. So therefore what I'm, what I'm arguing here is that the Roopkatha is an honor whose craft and enchantment essentially lie in the imaginations of gender that go beyond the normative and the expected. The frontispiece of Thakumar Chuli, which is, which is also the only chromolithograph in the text, is an illustration of Kiron Mala at the climax of her quest. So not within domestic boundaries or being the dutiful attendant to her husband, or, you know, being in, you know, depicted in an otherwise passive way. But, but it is the moment at which she fights all odds to find the golden bird sitting on the diamond tree, which I think is itself a testament to the striking effect of such a representation of the woman on both the anthologizer, as well as the expected readership. So coming now to, to the representation of masculinity in these tales, which I briefly mentioned, and I'll use a different method here so instead of narrating just a Roopkatha. I will compare relevant parts from different versions of the tale about the brothers sheet Bosantu as they appear in different narrative forms and anthologies which I have put up on the slide. So to quickly revise the plot involves a king and his two wives. The first of whom he has two sons with. So, Pete and Bosantu and some in one version she is called Roop. The second wife plots to have the brothers removed from kingdom. She succeeds, and the brothers are thrown into the wild to fend for themselves. They meet two very different set of challenges, but emerge successful in the end and are reunited with each other. Now, in every version of the sheet Bosantu tale, apart from the Roopkatha version in Takumar Chuli, the faiths of the brothers are decided by the act of eating another living being most commonly this is a bird. The brothers usually over here a bird pair prophesying about their faiths, saying that the one who eats one bird's heart will become king and the one who eats the other's heart will, I think, you know, laugh rubies from his mouth and cry pearls from his eyes. And this is followed by the brothers violently killing in these birds. However, it is only in the Takumar Chuli version that this episode is done away with completely. Instead, while trying to fetch water for Bosantu in the forest, she is carried away by an elephant that is out to select a room for the for the princess of the kingdom. So we have an image of a helpless, helpless sheet being carried on the elephants back. And even his seating on the throne is done by other people as he is too shocked to do anything. And we have a parallel image of a thirsty and frail and lost Bosantu who cries himself to sleep in the wilderness of the forest. Now the bird pair episode does appear in a different story in Takumar Chuli called Nil Komul or Lal Komul, again about two brothers. But here too, instead of the taking away of the bird's lives, the two brothers give their own blood to the bird pair to help them gain eyesight. And this points to another recurring trope within the Rukkatha wherein male characters are repeatedly sent into unfamiliar spaces that directly challenge the efficacy of a martial masculinity and bring out a softer and more giving masculinity as more desirable. So through the representations of masculinity in stories like Ranguli and Polapati Rajkona, for example, we find the trope of the powerless and smaller male characters triumphing over more physically able and violent characters. And even though there are the occasional aggressive primary characters like Nil Komul in the tale Nil Komul or Lal Komul or the minister's son in Patal Kona Munimala, it is always their kinder, even more vulnerable brothers or friends who the lead princesses choose to marry. The Rukkatha then becomes a domain that imaginatively conjures images of an alternative masculinity that takes many forms but is almost always positioned in opposition to forms of overpowering violent and authoritative masculinities. Now, using the same comparative method as in the last section, I will finally highlight a particular way in which the literary mechanisms of the Rukkatha come together with the changing social relations of the time in order to produce very specific effects on gender representations in the Rukkatha. And I will take the same sheet version of the tale as the first example. So the opening sequences of the Kicha version and the version collected by Swinerton include a prophesying of the death of the brother's mother or the king's first wife and of the brother's second wife and neglect faced by the two brothers. And this is followed by the mother falling ill and the king either himself promising or being made to promise that he would not remarry. And this is a promise that he of course does not. And soon after the queen dies. And the queen's death is a common event in the 1873, in the 1883 and 1892 versions. In the Kicha version, for example, Golamkatha describes the king being upset for many days after her death and the two brothers crying for their mother as their father married a second time. The queen's death therefore is an important turning point in all of these narratives discussed, but only in the Rukkatha version of the tale does the queen's fate change. So why she is still replaced by a second wife, she does not die in this version. Instead she is turned into a parrot by the second wife and is able to fly away to another kingdom. So instead of killing the brother's mother off then, she is given wings in the Rukkatha almost as a safekeeping measure, enabling her to come back to her family at the end of the plot. And I find a similar treatment of gender destinies in the Rukkatha version of Patalkonna Monimala in Takumar Trili and the Gittika or ballad versions collected by Dinesh Chandrashen in his Mameshi Gittika. Where both the ballads Moluwa and Devan Bhavna have plots that mirror the plot of Patalkonna Monimala and both the ballads evoke a great sense of pathos by first setting up the female protagonists as able to overcome a number of hardships and then kind of rendering all of her efforts pointless by the ins and outs of the introduction of sort of a final and insurmountable crisis. For example, in Devan Bhavna after the female protagonist Shunai has escaped her character and the only way to save him is for Shunai to surrender herself back to the Devan. So the logical end to the goodness of both Moluwa and Shunai in these Gittika is in their taking of their own lives. Moluwa to save her lover with her and Shunai to save herself from being ripped by the Devan. But is reunited with her lover after cleverly tricking her abductor. In fact, in this Rukkatha the change seems almost deliberate when we study the imagery that is used in the different versions. So while Shunai arrives by the river on a boat to release her husband and embrace her own death and Moluwa drowns herself in the river. Monimala parts the waters of the river in order to escape and return to her lover. So while Moluwa and Shunai choose to be consumed by the water, it is the same water that becomes Monimala's escape to freedom. Now these episodes seem to point towards what I'm calling an emergence of female characters within the Rukkatha. And I use this term not to denote a novel arrival of female characters as this is definitely not unique to the Rukkatha. But a particular representation of these female characters whose goodness is no longer marked by their self-sacrifice but by their wit and presence of mind and courage. Now this inflection could be related to the emerging ideas of middle-class childhood at this time. As the proliferation of literature specifically directed at the child or the mother raising a child, so in the form of books, magazines, child-during manuals, or even Takumar Chuli being an example because it was the first publication in a series called Matri Grom Thabuli or the mother's book series, showing that this was a time when the emotional and moral ties between the mother and the child were tightening. In relation to this, we can think about an essay by Pradeep Kumar Bose, where he describes this new discourse on the family that lay at the basis of the rise of the middle class at this time with its, and I quote, radical separation between work and leisure, public life and private life, childhood and adulthood. More importantly, he focuses on the centrality of a new idea of the child in the understanding of this family who was attributed with, and I quote, an impressionability, vulnerability and innocence and as requiring a correct protected and prolonged period of nurture. Even Tagore's preface as well as the Kinaranjan Mitra Mojumdas forward to Takumar Chuli, therefore contribute to the production of what maternal roles for the middle class were expected to be at this time, and storytelling with its attendant implications of leisure, of sentimentality, of affection was really at the crux of this. And, you know, as the closest real world identification of the young women in these narratives would be the young mothers in charge of reading the tales out to their children, perhaps the repeated deaths of young women, as in the case of the Orbitika versions of the tales were perceived as too emotionally overwhelming for the middle class child who could afford to be vulnerable, emotional and intensely attached to the mother. At the same time the child was also being seen as a figure defined by his ability to imagine and in need of not just disciplining but also entertainment and wonder. In the street is on folk literature called Lok Shahito, which was published in 1907. The board comments at length on why folk folk narratives are best suited to the taste of children. In this essay we can clearly see the child being recognized as an individual with specific literary needs and a specific psychology, which is defined by his or her imagination. So the Rupa actually lies at this intersection, where on the one hand dying mothers were considered too emotionally jarring for the child was now to be in an emotionally intense relationship with the mother, but also on the other, there is the connection of fantasy, which is to surprise and in fact subvert what is real, or what is conventional, which then animates such imaginative and unreal twists such as the door running turning into a parrot or Monimala parting the waters, which would lead to other genres that are more loyal to depicting events as they happen in the real world. And this has important implications for gendered representations at a time when the boundaries around gendered roles were tightening within the discourse of Shadeshi. So, so this brings me to the conclusion of my presentation today. This discussion of the old woman who almost defines the packaging of the genre and the discourse around the Rupa as well as the gendered characters and relations within the Rupa. What I'm trying to argue is that the context of Shadeshi is, of course, crucial to the understanding of the Rupa term, and yet to over determinate by the gender discourse of Shadeshi which as scholars have argued was increasingly setting tighter boundaries on what was expected from men and women, risks losing sight of the many social, economic, cultural and literary factors that work together to result in a much more prismatic understanding of gender. And I want to state here that in doing this project, I don't mean to portray the Rupa in terms of whether then you know this is a progressive genre or a regressive genre, but rather locate the Rupa very much in the context of the turn of the 20th century and all the different factors that would inform the crystallization of the Rupa term, which results in a diversity of gendered representations that help us look beyond the Shorani, Durani binary or the good woman and bad woman binary. So rather than completely becoming an instrument of the Shadeshi discourse and movement, there are ways in which a critical reading of both these magical tales as well as the paratext of the anthologies actually resist this and provide ways of imagining gender that go beyond what seems most apparent and most obvious. And ultimately the most Shadeshi genre of all therefore also reveals the very fissures and exclusions that mark the discourse and movement of Shadeshi in Bengal. So thank you very much. I'll stop there. Thank you so much Rahi. Thank you. Thank you for that in depth study of the Rukkotha and for bringing in such, you know, examples and showing us examples of images, which always I think makes the Rukkotha more livelier. And let's us think about a possible performative aspect of the of the genre itself. So I would now like to invite Srimoy Das Rukkotha to have a conversation with Rahi. Srimoy, it's over to you. Thank you Priyanka and thank you Rahi so much for inviting me to have this conversation and to chair this session. That was fascinating and it's given me so many things to think about and so many things to talk about. I am having sort of problems sort of figuring out where to start but I think I'll start where you sort of talk about the sort of the Orientalist versus the nationalist dichotomy in studying a genre like the Rukkotha. Right, and that is something because I mean we have had Rukkothas in Bengal since before the sort of fairy tale as a genre came into, you know, into the country as a colonial import. But there have been other genres of children's literature, which have sort of, which exist as a result of that colonial travel right. And so even in studying these other genres, I have noticed this same sort of dichotomy and that's a comment, not a question. But you know this, and I think that that dichotomy is a very sort of important part in the way children's literature as a category of literature was imagining nationhood. But here's my question. During the Swadeshi movement you also talk about, you know, not over determining between the local and the global influences, right, and the Swadeshi movement as a moment, which was a coalescing of a sort of authentic culture that united all Bengalis. My sort of question and I'm very curious about this. So, in this sort of tag between the global and the local, there was also an expansion of the local to include the national, right. So, if we think about, you know, if we go beyond thinking of the local as regional, or sort of like as a linguistic boundary. I don't know about Rukwatha and this is coming through but folk tales have existed, sort of across India, right. So I was wondering whether, because at that point there was also like a discourse which sort of stated that the partition of Bengal was symbolic of what was going on at a national level right and that was part of the the whole sort of trust against like that was the direct sort of resistance against the partition of Bengal as a colonial decision but there was also a resistance to colonialism based on the concept of the nation which was going on at the same time, and and through this movement. So I was wondering if there were influences from other vernaculars which made those connections between the local as regional and the local as national, you know, and and also sort of positive this form of influence just sheer curiosity. Yes, thank you for your question, Shivani. And I'm glad you asked this because the folk tale or the fairy tale or you know the Rukwatha is a genre that lends itself very well to these kinds of politics right and and you know as I tried to discuss towards the beginning. There was this whole constellation of influences that it was taking from, and of course I guess I ended up focusing more on, you know, translations of European folk tales and then sort of Bengali narrative traditions, but of course, you know, just like you know you said about the politics of of Shadeshi or and you know the national nationalist movement transcending these regional boundaries for the folk tale did as well. So I think a good example of this would be Sheetadevi Shantadevi Hindustani Uphukatha, which was actually a translation of folk tales of Hindustan by Shri Chandrabos and these were tales collected from the regions of Agra and Aoud, right. So, again, this kind this and also these tales were collected from there and then translated to English, and then this was translated to Bengali by Sheetadevi and Shantadevi as Hindustani Uphukatha. And of course this this anthology became quite popular right and both of these collections work constantly in their prefaces, highlighting how they have received rave reviews in sort of review journals in London. So there's this huge kind of, you know, sort of multiple kind of points at which you know the influences are drawn or aspirations are stated. And you know the specific case of Hindustani Uphukatha and folk tales of Hindustan being you know is a good example of how the idea of the national was transcending national boundaries but also transcending regional boundaries while also sort of creating this discourse of our culture and you know Bengali culture or Shadeshi or things like that. So, again, like many other tensions that define the genre of the Uphukatha, this is definitely a central one. Because Shadesh doesn't just mean like our land as in Bengal, Shadesh is also Swadesh. So like yeah. Thank you for that. I and okay so the next question I have which you know you may have anticipated knowing me, which is that there is fairy tales and the fantasy and enchantment that come with fairy tales and then there is fantasy as a literary genre, which was also becoming quite popular around the turn of the century. We know like we have evidence of people reading Alice, reading Peter Pan, there's Konkabuti, the genre of nonsense was becoming popular, which was also embedded in the politics of the time, the Shadeshi politics of the time. But in sort of, I would say, in different resistive cadences than the Uphukatha and then of course like Tagore himself adapted or translated and Steve's vice versa, right, the version of which we know today's Freaky Friday. And then there were, there was a lot going on with the fantasy genre itself. So was did these scholars who were and who were collecting the the folk tales and the fairy tales, because of the, because of the users of its enchantments. Did they sort of was there a distinction between that and the genre of the fantasy, which also, I mean, there may not have been there may have been sort of like a complete sort of overlap but like this is something which I am curious about because I haven't been able to find, you know, Tagore wrote also the the preface for Konkabuti, which came out the preface which came out in Shadhana, and he again talks about the same uses of enchantment that he's talking about when he's talking about Takuma Julie, you know, and they're, they're different genres of the use of the fantastic so yeah. Right. So I guess you know about your question about the distinction between the Rukkotha and some of the other other texts that you named or other genres that you named like Konkabuti. I think one of the main sort of distinctions that was being pushed or you know claimed by the collectors of the folk tales is this distinction between these being collected fairy tales or collected material therefore authentic, and the others being literary fairy tales or literary fantasy right. So, I mean of course there wasn't a hierarchy, I mean they have, you know, that's not the way that they presented sort of this distinction. But the claims to authenticity were were very important to the kind of shape the Rukkotha was being deliberately given at this point so a lot of the accounts of the collection of Rukkotha would, you know, would be accompanied by these excruciating details about how difficult it was to reach these spots and, you know, how physically arduous it was and, you know, so therefore corresponding then to how authentic these tales are because they're kind of, you know, far away from here and untouched by everything that's happening, you know, here in our region and their region sort of a thing. So that would be the main difference between, between, you know, something like Konkabuti and something like say Takumar Chilli. And about the, so the, you know, Tagore's preface to Konkabuti. And like I've mentioned to you before, you know, it was very, it was very important to me when I was studying the discursive understanding of the Rukkotha. And Tagore, you know, discusses the second half of Konkabuti, which is a dream narrative and says, this is not a dream, this is a Rukkotha. And then goes into, you know, sort of a discursive sort of separation of what constitutes a dream and what constitutes a Rukkotha with very specific comments on, you know, what a child can dream. So Konkabuti is a child, and this is not something that a child can dream about. And, you know, therefore, you know, as a sort of implied meaning being that the Rukkotha is an arena where the imagination, you know, can truly run amok, right. So it's not a dream, but it's a Rukkotha and all of these things are happening in this dream narrative. So, you know, it is a Rukkotha. So I think that there were crucial ways in which these other narratives of fantasy were linked to the Rukkotha. And literally, sort of literally, the literary fairytale was, I think also heavily building on, you know, the tropes that were already doing their rounds in oral tales that were collected as Rukkotha and, you know, published in anthologies like Takumar Chuli. Konkabuti itself, I think, repeatedly kind of takes on, of course, you know, it has similarities with Alice, but it also has similarities with tropes found within, you know, the Rukkotha tradition. And I think it's interesting because at one point, Konkabuti, I think when she's trying to figure out, you know, how, oh, she's trying to figure out how she can stop her, you know, stop kids too. So her lover and future husband from turning into a tiger and she doesn't know what to do. And she actually refers to Rukkotha tradition and says, well, in Rukkotha, usually when a human being turns into an animal, something has been pressed into their heads. So I think I need to go and look at Ketu's head to see if, you know, something stuck there and pluck it out. So he stops turning into a tiger. So I think that, you know, this is a good example of how, you know, literary fantasy was also kind of, you know, they were constantly referring to each other in ways that were kind of building on each other. No, I agree. And that moment is amazing because like she refers to Rukkotha and she also, I think, listens to her father. And then she goes and removes the booty and that is a fatal mistake. That is a failure. Yes, the plan failed. It's like the patriarchy and sort of Rukkotha coming together to give her a prescription in that moment. So it's the comments happen in all kinds of very, yeah, like, I know that and this sort of brings me to my third question if I have time for a third question, unless, you know, the audience have their questions and Yes, we do. I think we only have one question as of now from the audience. So please go ahead. See, it's what I was going to say, right. So the all the resistance is sort of happening in very sort of multi-pronged, multi-faceted ways. And again, I love the thing that you said about alternate masculinity and subversions of sort of femininity that is happening in the Rukkotha. Something that again, I have also noticed in other genres. So my question was these specifically about the alternative masculinity. Is that was that present just in sort of Takuma Julie because you give us examples from Takuma Julie. And by the way, it was amazing to see those illustrations after such a long time. I don't have a copy of the book here. But yeah, so was that a Takuma Julie specific thing? Like was that Doki Naranjan Mitra Mojanda or was that present across other collections of Rukkothas as well? Right. So I refer to a few anthologies of Rukkotha, but and specifically, you know, the ones that declared their sort of not allegiance, but kind of, you know, place, place themselves within this whole Shodeshita and, you know, kind of retrieval of our culture, this kind of a thing. So that would include Takudada Rukkotha, Ranga Didi Rukkotha, Takuma Julie of course. Right. And I mean, Takuma Julie of course exemplifies, you know, what the Rukkotha was to become. And, you know, in the present day, it's common to actually find sort of publications that call themselves Takuma Julie or even the animated, you know, sort of Sunday primetime series that that's called Takuma Julie of course. But the tales that they, you know, adapt or the tales that are printed actually go beyond the, you know, the sort of corpus of tales that were in the original Takuma Julie. So in that sense, sort of this tapestry is dominated by Takuma Julie. But I find, you know, to answer your question, these alternative sort of imaginations of masculinity, this softer kind of masculinity is present in other anthologies. But I find that the other anthologies aren't arranged and categorized and streamlined as much as Takuma Julie is. So if you look at the text itself, it's, it's almost kind of excruciatingly categorized, right. It's, it has 17 tales and then subdivided into four parts and then each part has a theme and, you know, things like that. So it is more common for other genres to be a bit, you know, more all over the place with its themes and representations than it was for Takuma Julie. But, you know, in my discussion of alternate to masculine piece I've definitely used instances from all of these anthologies and I think that it has, you know, more to do with the imagination of childhood at this time like I discussed, rather than an individual anthologizer. I mean, I really wish I had more of an idea about Doki Naranjoon's own motives and, you know, sort of, you know, what was guiding him in his categorization but then, I mean, I haven't found anything as of now so. Yeah, that would be fascinating to know. I think also the other thing that adds to this alternative, this course of alternative masculinity is the idea of the effeminate Bengali. Right. So, I mean, that's the, at least that's one of the sort of framing discourses I've found in the adventure narrative. Right. Yeah. Right. So I guess, you know, there's enough scholarship on on this sort of image of the effeminate Bengali Babu or, you know, Bengali. And of course, you know, they go into this topic in great, you know, with a lot of nuance. But I think, you know, as far as I remember, they also talk about, so they place it within a complex politics, right. So there was feminization of, you know, the Bengali people by the colonizers as an insult. And then there was also a claiming of this, or owning of this effeminacy as a, as a symbol of the failure of colonial rule by the colonized right but that's that's quite, you know, the complex politics there itself. And Indira Chaudhary also discusses, you know, sort of a lot of cultural activities that were happening. That were trying to also reclaim some form of masculinity, right, some form, you know, that broke away from these kind of frail and weak representations of masculinity. And in that sense, you know, I find it interesting that the Rupaka actually sort of embraces this masculinity, this kind of giving softer masculinity, in the way that it is always positioned against these more violent characters who might be violent, but might also be in this sort of new Komolal, Komol pair or the King's son and Minister's son pair, you know, one of whom is, you know, much more violent and doesn't think twice before killing a snake or killing a demon and the other one's scared. The funny thing is at the end, it is not this valiant character who kind of paved the way with all these, you know, violent acts and aggressive acts, but the, the more the weaker friend that ends up getting married to the princess or the princess chooses to marry this person other than that. So, you know, that speaks to me about a kind of an embracing of this, you know, more giving and sort of softer masculinity, which is, which is interesting about the Rupaka and, you know, I have some more kind of, you know, trying to locate this to do but yeah. Yeah, I think that is a, that is a fascinating thing. I actually did not know that that had happened in the Rupakatha. I had, and I had noticed this sort of reclaiming politics, as you say, like it's a complex politics and this reclaiming as a form of colonial resistance. Thank you. Thank you so much for that, you know, really enlightening talk and some sort of fantastic and clarificatory answers to my questions. And I'm going to stop and pause for now and and let give others the chance to interact with you. Thank you. Thank you, Shimui. Thank you, Rahi. I think we have two questions. So I'm going to take them in order. The first question is from Steven Raiden. Do the hijra appear within the stories? Thinking of the historical links to fertility or birth and national tradition. Does the lap of their presence say something about the national identity being built? Right. No, I mean, thank you for that question and it's a useful, you know, question and an insight. And no, I mean, off the top of my head, I cannot think of a hijra character being being represented here. Yeah, I mean, the thing that gets closest to, you know, questioning any kind of gendered identities and gendered sort of attraction is, you know, also in the period Malatel where she dresses up as a man and then has this whole sexual attraction episode with names who are trying to seduce her. But no, I mean, nothing about, nothing about hijras and you're right. I mean, a lot of these stories were actually narrated in the atur ghar. So in the sort of birthing room, right? And one would assume therefore that, you know, given the hijra's link to, can I see the question? Right. So, you know, the hijra, yes, I can see it. Thanks. So yeah, so given the hijra's link to, you know, fertility and birth, that some of these stories would include hijra characters and, and of course, you know, as we know, these stories, even though these claims were being made about these these, these tales being authentic. And, you know, sort of right straight from the mouth of the tellers who are more who are apparently mostly old women. We do know that there was a great amount of sanitizing that happened before they were actually hijacked. So be it, you know, as far as the content was concerned, as far as the language was concerned. And each of these, like you said has something to say about the national identity, and who they would want to exclude from this sort of hegemonic understanding of who the legitimate heirs of the nation were. So yes, thank you. Thank you, Raheem. Your second question is from Isha Sheil. Hi Raheem, thank you for that thought provoking paper. I was wondering if the other narratives of fantasy you speak of might also open up the space for reconsidering the contact zone spawned by subaltern cosmopolitanism modernities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So the other narratives of fantasy that you have referred to here would be the, so the likes of Konkabuti, then the literary fantasy or the other, you know, old women's tales that I spoke about. I think Isha has to type in her, you know, she has to specify which one. I can sort of speak a little bit while Isha is clarifying. So, I think the answer to that is yes, but we also so children's literature as we recognize it today the genre. But from the sort of the folk tales, the myths, the Rupakathas, which are, which are sort of, you know, which have that kind of pre-colonial past and oral past, that genre is very much a colonial import. It does fall into that sort of cosmopolitan contact zone, border thinking middle ground with many of the genres, like periodicals, like the literary fantasy, like, you know, adventure narratives, or even school narratives. You know, sort of reacting to the genre as it was imported in combination with whatever was indigenous, as well as sort of the laws and rules and policies which were being instituted around these sort of individual, you know, like, in individual topics like, for example, the school story, or even if we think about, you know, Tagore's formulation of the pedantic schoolmaster, the many poems in which he talks about it. A tale like Gini in which he has this young boy who is, you know, who is bullied, both by the sort of schoolmaster, as well as sort of excluded by other children, many of these things which he saw as endemic of a problem with colonial education, right. And so, let's say something like Pagladashu is obviously sort of responding to that. Something like Hemindra Kumar Ray's adventure stories is sort of responding to this idea of, you know, Bengali children having their imaginations opened to various kinds of others, right, others within the nation, others within the region and then others in the exotic abroad. So many of these are actually sort of functioning within that contact zone that you mentioned. But also I think the question to think about and this is something which I haven't found the answers to yet. The question to think about is, you know, what, what then is the function of that cosmopolitanism, right, and what then how far does the significance of that contact zone go, it's being deployed in various ways. But then there is also the indigenous which is being posited very, very strongly by various elements in India. So, yeah, so that's like my take on the whole thing. I think, thanks for elaborating. I think Asia has already specified that she was referring to concavuti so Rahi would you like to respond to her. Yes, no, I think I mean she might be really summed it up perfectly. And also because I think narratives like concavuti which you know deal with the larger question of fantasy narratives, especially the literary fantasy is much more she has to be in these fields than it is mine. So I'm happy to just let it be at that answer. Okay, I think we have one more question. No. Aisha Tra was trying to clarify that she had a, she made a typo. So bond. Yeah, she was speaking about subaltern cosmopolitan modernity so there is no question. But we could, we could wait for questions or Srimoyee if you want to ask something else. You do not have much time we will have to wrap up soon but if there's anything that you feel that you want to ask her he please go ahead. Well, I, I, you know Rahi stock was so wonderful that I have so many questions and so many points of discussion that if there is space there's something else I would sort of like to ask, which is that you also talk about this sort of. I, I don't know whether to call it a dichotomy but this difference between sort of a child who needs regulation and discipline versus the child who needs sort of entertainment and worlds of imagination opened up to them right and this is a discourse which is taking us simultaneously in in Britain at the same time you know which is why I also talk of this as a as both an import as well as sort of actual indigenous concern. In the middle of this is education, which one would think, you know is solely on the side of regulation and discipline, but it's often not because in positing alternative indigenous discourses of education pedagogy methods. Imagination was emphasized and very much sort of like a romanticized idea of education. So, within which sort of like these these tales, the fantasy the enchantment, the tales with also that like the with also its connection to nature. Which you know formed a big part of thinking about romantic pedagogy again both across the across both countries right so I was wondering again within this sort of body of scholars and writers and thinkers who are dealing with the genre. Apart from that one thing which you mentioned about to go talking about a school for modern grandmothers, is there anything else that you've come across where you know, but the root quarter features into these educational discourses as well. Right, I mean, or there's two kind of examples coming, you know coming to be there not directly related to education vis-a-vis curriculum. But, but just a kind of differential kind of valuing of English and you know English fight is Bangla Rupkatha in, I think Indira Debbie's memoir, where you know she she talks about, you know how she, her mother would never read, read out or you know narrate Rupkatha to her, and that even her servant wasn't that great but her cousin Usha did the servant, you know I think Mongola was you know a very good storyteller. So how she would always kind of cuddle up with her cousin and listen to you know this you know her attendant tell them stories. And then how she would go back to school, where she was apparently a popular cool kid, and you know when she was kind of waiting for the school bus to come being surrounded by her fans, she would narrate English fairy tales to them. Right, so again this doesn't relate to curriculum, but in my head it's more related to the space of the school, the kind of school that Indira Debbie being from, you know, the Togo family would have gone to, and then the home space of you know the Rupkatha, and you know sort of knowing what was cool and what was you know, only and comfort. Right, this is one and then this whole tussle between the child who needs regulation versus the child who needs entertainment again this is not related to curriculum. But one of the sort of one of the sources that really kind of bring this out for me is child during manuals. Right, so the. There's one called Shantane Choritra Gautam. I think published around 1920s, which actually talks about the which actually has a whole chapter dedicated to Golpo or stories right, and this entire chapter is a discussion about the fact that because the child you know is imaginative and imagination is of you know is also the power the child needs to read and you know understand Rupkatha, but then it is it is followed up by the discussion about, but you know these tales talk about little boys and girls falling in love and going to you know all of these descriptions about how beautiful the girl is and this is not right and and so for you know for me this is an anxiety about imagination, taken to its logical extreme, which is sexual imagination right, and you know there's this huge amount of anxiety in this chapter about so then you know how do we kind of tighter this to you know give them the right amount of imagination, while also not going, you know, too far. So this kind of push and pull about you know how much imagination and who imagines and how does one imagine also became the flip side to the question of you know how much regulation, you know, how much freedom of imagination expression so. So yeah so no I mean to answer your question I can't think of anything any Rupata in the curriculum, but maybe that's something that I will need to probe a bit more into. First of all I will say educational discourse doesn't always have to do with curriculum and and these you know conversations between children in playgrounds and bus stops are as important to the whole sort of concept of how we consider the education of a time. But I would also say that the idea of, of, you know that you pointed out of the group got her lending itself to sexual imagination sort of that being taken to an extreme. This is also happening right at the same time when debates about child marriages and child sexuality are completely like raging. So, you know, and of course there was always the concept that like, like you know, a part of girlhood was the leaving of the family at a very young age and going to an in-laws family where they are for all intents and purposes brought up in a way as well. So I find this fascinating that there is resistance to cut her in these grounds when the tradition is just so alive in in in society and domesticity of that time. Absolutely. Thank you Shreemoi and thank you Rahi. It is time to wrap up. It's nearly seven and we don't have any more questions but thank you for that, you know, very enriching session for that very lively discussion. Thank you to our audience for joining us tonight. And please join us again on the 19th of July, same time at 5.30. We have Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir from King's College London, and Ari Bhatia, who's an author based in Oslo. And they will be talking to us on Vine on Trellis. Pondicherry is Creolizing Culture. So do join us and have a great evening. And thank you for joining us again. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for having me.