Shobhanasundari Mukhopadhyay

Shobhanasundari Mukhopadhyay (born Shovona Devi Tagore in 1877 in Calcutta; died May 26, 1937, in Howrah[1]) was an Indian writer, known for her collections of folktales. She was the daughter of Hemendranath Tagore and the niece of writer Rabindranath Tagore.

Shobhanasundari Mukhopadhyay
Young woman looking to the right, wearing a high-necked dark dress, a gemstone necklace, and a light-colored sash. Her name, Shovona Tagore, is signed in the lower right.
Shovona Devi, 1915
Born1877
Calcutta, British India
Died1937
Howrah, British India
Other namesShovona Devi, Shovona Tagore, Shovana Devi, Shovana Tagore
Parent
RelativesNiece of Rabindranath Tagore

Biography

The fifth daughter of Hemendranath Tagore, Shovona Devi Tagore was raised in an upper-class, English-educated Hindu family in Calcutta (Kolkata).[2][3] She married Nagendranath Mukhopadhyay, who was an English professor in Jaipur.[3]

In 1923, her uncle Rabindranath Tagore wrote the letter-poem "Shillong-er Chithi" ("Letter from Shillong") to a young Shovona.[4]

She died in 1937 at age sixty of complications relating to high blood pressure.[1]

Writing

One of Mukhopadhyay's first projects was an English translation of her aunt Swarnakumari Devi's Bengali novel Kahake?[3][5] After this, Mukhopadhyay became interested in recording local oral traditions and folktales.

The Orient Pearls (1915)

The Orient Pearls: Indian Folklore contains twenty-eight folktales, gathered by Mukhopadhyay herself, some from family servants.[2][6][3] Her prefatory note to the book describes her inspiration and process:

The idea of writing these tales occurred to me while reading a volume of short stories by my uncle, Sir Rabindranath Tagore; but as I have none of his inventive genius, I set about collecting folk-tales and putting them into an English garb; and the tales contained in the following pages were told to me by various illiterate village folks, and not a few by a blind man still in my service, with a retentive memory, and a great capacity for telling a story.[7]

The Orient Pearls was reviewed in publications such as The Dial and The Spectator and appeared in libraries around the world shortly after its publication.[8][9][10] The book brought Bengali folktales to the attention of English-speaking folklorists around the world, who used it as a source in their comparative work, including new forms of computer-aided study.[11][12][13][14] Her stories have been republished in recent academic collections of the writings of Indian women.[15]

Some scholars have positioned Mukhopadhyay's work as similar in method and tone to British colonial ethnography.[2][16] Others describe its similarity to other Victorian short story collections produced in India and elsewhere, filled with subtle ideas about social reform,[17] or as demonstrative of the complex sociopolitical circumstances of translating folktales into the colonizer's language. Others view her interest in local culture as a precursor to Indian nationalism.[18] Another scholar argues that Tagore's preface acknowledges the constrained position of a female author.[19]

Later works

Mukhopadhyay published four books on Indian folklore, religion, culture, and myths for the London-based publishing firm Macmillan between 1915 and 1920. In Indian Fables and Folk-lore (1919) and The Tales of the Gods of India (1920), she includes information on her source material for the stories, something she had not previously done.[3][20]

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Works

References
  1. "Deaths". The Times of India. Mumbai, India. 10 June 1937. p. 2.
  2. Prasad, Leela (2020-11-15). The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India. Cornell University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-1-5017-5228-5.
  3. Deb, Chitra (2010-04-06). Women of The Tagore Household. Penguin UK. ISBN 978-93-5214-187-6.
  4. Das, Manosh (June 28, 2012). "Tagore's 'Letter from Shillong' in English". The Times of India. Retrieved 2021-11-07.
  5. Rani, K. Suneetha (2017-09-25). Influence of English on Indian Women Writers: Voices from Regional Languages. SAGE Publishing India. ISBN 978-93-81345-34-4.
  6. Prasad, Leela (October 2015). "Cordelia's Salt: Interspatial Reading of Indic Filial-Love Stories". Oral Histories. 29 (2): 253. eISSN 1542-4308.
  7. Mukhopadhyay, Shobhanasundari (1915). The Orient Pearls. New York: MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
  8. Bulletin of the Public Library of the City of Boston. Boston: The Trustees of the Boston Public Library. 1916. p. 123.
  9. "New Books". The Dial. LX (716): 394. April 13, 1916 – via Google Books.
  10. "The Orient Pearls by Shovona Devi (book review)". The Spectator. 115 (4564): 885. December 18, 1915 – via ProQuest. This is a collection of fairy-stories, fables, and folklore which may take a good place among the numerous books of this kind that now come to us from India. If the English is the unaided work of Sir Rabindranath Tagore's niece, it is a remarkable achievement; little naïvetés of expression and unexpected terms add piquancy rather than detract from the effect.
  11. Brown, W. N. (1921). "Vyaghramari, or the Lady Tiger-Killer: A Study of the Motif of Bluff in Hindu Fiction". American Journal of Philology. XLII (166): 139 – via GoogleBooks.
  12. Bruce, James Douglas (1923). The Evolution of Arthurian Romance from the Beginnings Down to the Year 1300. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. p. 22.
  13. Davidson, Hilda Ellis; Davidson, Hilda Roderick Ellis; Chaudhri, Anna (2006). A Companion to the Fairy Tale. DS Brewer. p. 245. ISBN 978-1-84384-081-7.
  14. Colby, B. N.; Collier, George A.; Postal, Susan K. (1963). "Comparison of Themes in Folktales by the General Inquirer System". The Journal of American Folklore. 76 (302): 318–323. doi:10.2307/537928. ISSN 0021-8715. JSTOR 537928.
  15. Souza, Eunice de; Pereira, Lindsay (2004). Women's Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English. Oxford University Press India. p. 380. ISBN 978-0-19-566785-1.
  16. Prasad, Leela (2003). "The Authorial Other in Folktale Collections in Colonial India: Tracing Narration and its Dis/Continuities". Cultural Dynamics. 15 (1): 7. doi:10.1177/a033107. S2CID 219962230.
  17. K., Naik, M. (1987). "Chapter 3: The Winds of Change: 1857 to 1920". Studies in Indian English literature. Sterling Publishers. ISBN 81-207-0657-9. OCLC 17208758.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  18. Islam, Mazharul (1985). Folklore, the Pulse of the People: In the Context of Indic Folklore. Concept Publishing Company. p. 117.
  19. Roy, Sarani (2021-07-31). "Defining the Rupkatha: Tracing the Generic Tradition of the Bengali Fairy Tale". Children's Literature in Education. 53 (4): 488–506. doi:10.1007/s10583-021-09457-6. ISSN 0045-6713. S2CID 238761580.
  20. Shovona, Devi (1919). Indian Fables and Folk-lore. Macmillan.
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