13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

SIRCAR, Sanjay

When Kheer Turns to Cheese : Abanindranath Tagore's Kheer-er Putul (1896) between Bengal and France and Sweden

Abanindranath Tagore's Bengali Kheer-er Putul/The Condensed-Milk Doll (1896), apparently taken from a lost exercise book of folk tales transcribed by a female relative, is an elaborated 'Kunst' form of a North Indian folk tale (AT 459). Ironically, in Bengal, the folk tale has gained permanent currency in the vernacular primarily in this elaborated form (which has a section using a technique - the use of incarnated folk nursery rhymes - which seems to derive from Lewis Carroll). The actual folk tale itself does not appear to be well-known today in any other form, at least in urban Calcutta. Ironically too, the 'folk' versions are known only in English translation (or at any rate seem to be accessible only in these versions, and that with difficulty). The only other non-Indian analogues for this tale in folk tale bibliographies appear to be Farsi ones.

Doll is itself at the intersection of folk tale and art tale, and for now we may set aside comparisons of the Indian folk versions, the Indian art version, and the Farsi folk versions, to consider the minor 'mutations' that have occurred in one line of 'literary' transmission of this folk material, i.e. written translation of written text, annotation and illustration (there are also other independent lines of literary transmission for this tale-type). The 1933 French translation of Doll, with decorative icons and copious notes, apparently intended for a scholarly audience, was (a) translated into Swedish in 1949 sans notes, apparently for a child-audience, (b) re-illustrated in 1950 by the same hand as the 1933 edition, (c) re-illustrated by a different hand in the 1980s and (d) translated into Spanish with the same illustrations as that in the third French edition.

This paper considers the alterations and the addition-accretions that have occurred in the literary movement of this version of this tale type from Bengal via France to Sweden (and, we may presume, Spain). The French text, then the Swedish text (and presumably the Spanish one), substitute 'kheer' (a sweet condensed milk preparation and itself an ambiguous word) with 'cheese' (and hence replace sweet with sour).  This line of transmission goes far beyond anything that can be considered 'translation' when it renders ordinary speech into song/verse, and actually invents a short section of plot at the end, which has absolutely no warrant in the original.  In the process, the accompanying sets of illustrative matter seem (a) generally to display a naive Orientalism and (b) incongruously to end up rendering a Hindu tale into a Muslim one (through costume), a process bolstered through such words as 'vizier'.  Hence, the fortunes of Doll concretely exemplify how folk tale linguistic/cultural 'mutation' can occur via a sequence of direct written translations and illustration/re-illustration, just as it does in oral transmission, with the significant difference that no oicotypification takes place in the new language, and an Orientalist distance is retained which is usually thought to be alien to folk transmission/ mutation.