‘Thakumar Jhuli’ – The Ghost Stories of Bengali Folklore with Arya Ray

Our series of talks is funded exclusively by donations. The talks are free to access but if you can support the project and do not support it on ko-fi or patreon, please choose the 'pay-what-you-can' option to give a donation directly to the speaker.

If you'd like to support more regularly, you can use the links below

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/romancingthegothic

Ko-fi - https://ko-fi.com/samhirst

My paper’s central focus is on the ghost stories of the Bengali folkloric phenomenon known as ‘Thakumar Jhuli’ (Grandmother’s Satchel). The image in the collective imagination of the Bengali household is as follows:

On a cool June evening, a woman in her late sixties takes a seat under an old banyan tree. She smiles at the dozens of village children excitedly tugging at the red border of her white sari, and fishing a handful of loose sheets of paper out of her cloth satchel, begins to tell a story.

While this tradition has had many reincarnations within the cultural landscape of Bengal and South Asia, such as Lal Behari Day’s Folk-Tales of Bengal (1883), Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Thakumar Jhuli (1907), as well as the animated series of the same name, the stories come from centuries-old oral tradition, as well as mythology and folklore.

Bengali ghostly lore is incredibly rich and diverse, but also a surprisingly understudied branch of literature. My paper will introduce the audience to this tradition, trace some of the different archetypes, and then place it alongside the European ‘gothic mode’ to study emerging manifestations of home and (un)belonging, examining dichotomies of belonging/alienation and home/displacement. These characters are different, their motivations are different, and their position within middle-class society is different.

I will conclude by underlining how Bengali ghostly folklore both expands the meanings of what makes a text ‘gothic’ while simultaneously resisting being included under its umbrella as it requires its own vocabulary and language for meaning-making.