Devilish Dames and Damsels: Witches, Demonesses and Supernatural Women in Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder’s Thakurmar Jhuli

Abstract

Every fairy-tale needs a good old-fashioned villain. Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder’s 1907 seminal collection of fantasy folklore titled Thakurmar Jhuli or Grandma’s Satchel (of Local Legends), aims to embody the campfirestory/ lullaby essence of Bengali grandmothers’ storytelling their young wards to sleep, or to awaken companionable interest. Preliminary readings may categorize all villainesses in the stories, firstly, as cut from the same cloth (species), and secondly, as unequivocally evil, which is emphasized by each tale ending with their inevitable death at the hands of the human protagonists. However, the tales represent a diverse queue of comprehensively characterized paranormal entities. The paper examines their comparability to feminist theorist Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous feminine’ archetypes for otherized women in fantasy horrors. The antagonists range from old sisters spinning destinies out of wheels of fortune, to witches exhibiting retributive powers who rule both seas and lands, to flesheating wives and mothers who traverse the spectrum of twisted maternal instincts from cannibalizing their own progeny in revenge, to capturing and adopting live prey. In addition to exploring possible folkloric and mythological origins and parallels of each discernible kind of supernatural women, the paper aims to identify those that possess abilities drawn from amalgamating multiple types. The paper will further look into the terminology used to denote the supernatural in the Bengali version versus the English translation, and possible mistranslation and retainment. For the purpose of the paper, Sutapa Basu’s English translation of Majumder’s anthology, titled Thakurmar Jhuli: Princesses, Monsters and Magical Creatures (2021) has been consulted as the primary text, supplemented by the original Bengali version.