13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

CHAKRABORTY, Biplab

‘Lokabharan’- The Style of Recreating Folk Narrative In  Literature

Folk narratives are used in literature in various forms. Literary artists recreate folk narrative by way of artistic presentation. ‘Lokabharan’ is such a style, whereby traditional folk narratives are incorporated into modern Bengali poems. The present paper throws new light on the folk narrative and its artistic uses in literature, particularly in Bengali poetry.

The word ‘Lok’ in Sanskrit means folk. ‘Abharan’ essentially denotes the act of holding something as a whole. Now the term ‘Lokabharan’, as an assimilated (Sandhi) form of the two words, pinpoints a style of using folk elements as an indivisible part of literature, especially poems. Such a device entails a process of artistic creation.

Folk narrative may be discernible on different levels within a poem. This may be in the form of fairy tales, myths, proverbs and stories related to the creation of a proverb. Folk narratives are also used as rudimentary elements of literary style. This may be examined on different levels of expression, namely the syntactic level, the semantic level etc. All these levels are closely related to the style of  ‘Lokabharan’.

Folk narratives are symptomatic of folk life and culture. In literature there are various references to folk life by way of using folk narratives. It is therefore essential to study the style of using folk narratives in modern literature as a mode of folk narrative research.