Folk Tales from Meghalaya - by Sobhona Bhattacharjee (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A collection of sixteen magical myths and fables that will transport you to the abode of clouds!

In the beautiful hills of Khasi, Garo and Jaintia in Meghalaya, there are fairies that can create rivers, a plant that can make people invisible and a fern bush which can ward off evil spirits. There are also three-headed giants, queens and villagers, animals and birds, and many other fascinating plants and creatures.

In this book, you will find a wonderful selection of stories about these fantastic beings and simple hill folk who have lived on these blue hills since ancient times.

Passed down by word of mouth over hundreds of years, these sixteen magical folk tales from Meghalaya, in the north-east of India, are full of adventure, wonder and excitement.

About the Author

Sobhona Bhattacharjee retired as a teacher from St Edmund's School, Shillong, where she developed a keen interest in the folk tales of India's Northeast and beyond and started documenting the oral literature through the people she met in everyday life. Her Khasi Folk Tales was first published in 1979. Although she works extensively on folk tales, her stories are not confined to that. Her first book was Nepali Lokokatha. Her other books are Meghalaya o Mizoram er Lokokatha, Desh Bidesher Lokokotha and an autobiographical sketch of Guwahati, Kichu Smriti Kichu Chobi. All her published works are in Bengali. She is eighty-three years old.

Utsa Bose is an MPhil scholar in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. After completing his schooling in Kolkata, he moved to Delhi to study English at St Stephen's College. His publications include the translated short fictions of Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay, Rajshekhar Basu, Manoranjan Byapari and Rabindranath Tagore. He lives in Oxford and divides his time between translation, writing and research.