Shobhanasundari Mukhopadhyay

Shovona Devi, 1915

Born| 1877

Calcutta, British India

Died| 1937

Howrah, British India

Other names| Shovona Devi, Shovona Tagore, Shovana Devi, Shovana Tagore
Parent(s)|

* Hemendranath Tagore (father)

Relatives| Niece of Rabindranath Tagore

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.

## Contents

* 1 Biography
* 2 Writing
* 2.1 The Orient Pearls (1915)
* 2.2 Later works
* 3 Works
* 4 References

## Biography[edit]

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[edit]

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)[edit]

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.[citation needed] 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[edit]

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:

Shobhanasundari Mukhopadhyay

## Works[edit]

* To Whom? An Indian Love Story (translation of Kahake? by Swarnakumari Devi, her aunt) (1898[5] or 1910[3])
* The Orient Pearls: Indian Folktales (1915) (At Wikisource; at Archive.org)
* Indian Nature Myths (1919) (open access at Internet Archive)
* Indian Fables and Folk-lore (1919) (transcription project; open access on HathiTrust; open access on GoogleBooks)
* The Tales of the Gods of India (1920)

## References[edit]

1. ^ a b "Deaths". The Times of India. Mumbai, India. 10 June 1937. p. 2.
2. ^ a b c 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. ^ a b c d e f 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.`{{cite web}}`: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
5. ^ a b 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.`{{cite book}}`: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
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.
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. doi:10.1007/s10583-021-09457-6. ISSN 0045-6713. S2CID 238761580.
20. ^ Shovona, Devi (1919). Indian Fables and Folk-lore. Macmillan.