Folk-Tales of Bengal — 22 Tales, 32 Warwick Goble Plates, the Tellers Named (PDF + EPUB)

In 1883 a Bengali professor of English sat down to write out the stories an old woman called Sambhu’s mother had told him as a boy. She had died. He found another teller — a Christian woman who had learned the tales from her grandmother — and then a Brahman, a barber, his own servant, a second Brahman. Twenty-two stories survived his search. None of the tellers knew English; he translated them at home.

Thirty years later Warwick Goble painted thirty-two plates for them, and Macmillan printed the book that most people who know these tales know them from.

Folk-Tales of Bengal returns that book to readers as a considered edition rather than a scan. A prince whose life is kept in a necklace inside a fish. A city of empty houses that fills at nightfall. A ghost who moves into a Brahman’s life while he is away. A jackal who marries a weaver to a princess by bluff alone. A boy born with a moon on his forehead, handed to a potter to be burned with his pots by six jealous queens, who grows up anyway.

You receive:

- a 281-page designed PDF at 129 × 198 mm, for tablets, laptops and printing;

- a reflowable EPUB for Kobo, Apple Books and most e-readers; Kindle readers can use Amazon’s Send to Kindle;

- all twenty-two tales complete, with Day’s 1883 preface and the closing rhyme every Bengali teller ended with;

- all thirty-two Goble plates, cropped from a 500 pixels-per-inch scan of the University of Toronto copy, each on its own page at the point in the story it illustrates;

- Day’s forty-seven footnotes on the page where he put them;

- “Who told these stories” — the chain of tellers, translator, illustrator and edition, placed before the preface;

- a plates index, a glossary of the Bengali and Sanskrit words Day left untranslated, and notes on the edition with every correction logged;

- DRM-free files that are yours to keep and move between devices.

The text is the 1912 Macmillan printing, checked against page images. Every departure from the transcription is listed in the notes: five printer’s errors the transcribers corrected, and two readings returned to what the 1912 page prints.

First book in Stories People Told, a shelf of restored folk-tale collections from the regions of India. Tamil Nadu, a second Bengal collection and the Deccan follow.

Selected, restored and newly set by Vishal T · @whatiamreadingtoday7