The Greatest Folktales of Bihar by Nalin Verma: Goodreads Review
I picked up this short book in New Delhi’s Khan Market just before my 13 hour plane ride back to the US and it kept me well entertained for the first part of the flight. Author Nalin Verma offers 37 folk tales and fables from Bihar, his homeland. These stories are filled with virtually every type of sentient being: sparrows and crows, jackals and lions, thieves and Brahmins, priests and thugs. Verma ends each tale with a short moral, such as, “You will find God if you are truly devoted to Him,” or “The pen is mightier than the lathi [the club].” Many stories illustrate how a certain person or animal outsmarts his more powerful rival.
A good example, and one of my favorites, is Ander Nagari, Chowpat Raja, translated as The Dark City and the Whimsical King. In it, a thief is plying his trade when a wall in the house he is robbing collapses. The man’s wife goes to the king and blames the house’s owner, a trader, who, in turn, blames the mason (who built the wall), who blames a prostitute (who diverted him), who blames her paramour, and so on until, in the end, the blame is placed on a poor disciple of a hermit. But before being hanged for the crime, the discipline outwits the king, with the result that the king ends up hanging himself! The story illustrates the value of being clever. And I believe it is no coincidence that it is a lowly disciple of a hermit who outsmarts the high-ranked king.
Verma has written an introduction that grounds the stories in the experience of his own childhood growing up in a poor village in Bihar–a place with no roads or electricity and where the sole means of transport was the bullock cart. From his vivid recollections, we can almost feel the stories growing out of that rich soil. We also learn that the “bards” of Bihar communicated their stories not only through narrative transmission, but also through ballads and songs. My only criticism, and it’s minor, is that the author could have said more about these forms and how they relate to the stories in the book. For example, are any of the narratives derived from ballads or do they have parallel songs? Why is one tale communicated as a story and another as a ballad? And if some stories have corresponding ballads or songs, a few examples would have been appreciated.
That said, The Greatest Folk Tales of Bihar is a welcome addition to the genre. As Verma notes, the world is changing at a lightening speed, and there is no time to waste if we do not want to lose such precious folk tales forever. So, buy the book–the stories are short, great fun to read, and there’s rarely a dull moment.