For most all of October and at least half of November last year, I was, for the first time ever, illustrating a charming book of stories – Ranikonye Katha: Dakshinaranjaner Jhuli Ghente Ultano Golper Jhuri. These tales, originally from Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Thakumar Jhuli have been reimagined by Satabdi Das, with an English edition, Once Upon the Queens: Gender-upturned Tales from Bengal, translated by Nadia Imam, and published by The Antonym Collection under their imprint Jilipi, for young readers.
In Satabdi’s retelling, princesses and queens prefer using their wits, their pens, and their paintbrushes over swords and armies, make independent decisions, determine their destinies and their responsibilities, and break free of the roles they were handed in Thakumar Jhuli – folk tales from Bengal which were originally painstakingly collected and rewritten by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar. In the Introduction to the first edition published in 1907, Rabindranath Tagore had lauded the collection’s significance in the nationalist self-making project combatting the cultural imperialism under colonisation, and its role in the preservation of oral tales that carried the sweetest nuances of one’s mother tongue. The book also had beautiful lithographs that had almost entirely shaped most of our childhood imaginations of fierce and fantastic otherworldly creatures.
The changes from the original tales are flagged and explained at the end of each story in a section called ‘Bhebe dyakho’/’Think about it’ introducing important notions of consent, discrimination of gender (or class, or race, or stereotypes), and ethics of conduct or governance to its young readers. Each story also has a nifty glossary explaining words, for example, aga, golui, boitha – the parts of fishing boat, or the difference between different kinds of pithe – ones made for royalty in the palace and ones made by common folk out of very pedestrian ingredients.
It took me a while to settle on a drawing style, it’s not particularly funny or clever this time, but I hope my young audience will like them. I also realised that I really loved drawing feisty old women, because there always have been and are so many of them in my life. Below are a few of my favourite spreads from the book:
Three rakkhosh (demoness? ogress?) grandmothers, who guard the seashore armed with sticks in ‘Kalabati’
Intrepid explorer princess, and prince in eternal slumber from ‘Ghumonto Puri’.
‘Lalkamal Neelkamal’ (literally ‘Red Lotus Blue Lotus’), two princes turned into gold and iron orbs.
Old woman on the moon spinning and weaving strands and yards of magic in ‘Sukhu Dukhu’.
Baby Crocodile outing her villainous fox schoolteacher in ‘Sheyal Pondit’.
‘Der Angule’, she’s only a finger and a half tall.
‘Malonchomala’, child bride fleeing through the dark forest with her infant husband. This is the only story for which the original is from Thakurdadar Jhuli, where the stories also have the added task of laying out norms for ‘good’, ‘demure’, ‘dutiful’ young women; but of course, Malonchomala questions all that is given and determines her own course.
The book is available at the Kolkata Bookfair from The Antonym Collection stall, E-22, and can also be pre-ordered from their website.
