Folklore of the Santal Parganas

The Santal people of Bengal and Bihar possess one of India's richest oral traditions, and this collection, assembled by the pioneering folklorist Cecil Henry Bompas from materials gathered primarily by Rev. O. Bodding, offers an unparalleled window into their world. The stories here are not sanitized for outside consumption. They brim with the earthy humor, shrewd morality, and supernatural terror that have sustained Santal villages for generations. Characters like the perpetually duped Bajun and his cohorts stumble through misadventures that oscillate between farce and dark fable, while the bongas (spirits) that haunt the Santal imagination intrude upon human affairs with a casualness that reveals how deeply animism permeates everyday life. This is not romanticized folklore for Western readers. It is the real thing: a record of a living tradition preserved at a moment when colonial India was already beginning to transform the world it documented. The collection endures because it captures something vanishingly rare: a tribal culture's own stories, in their own voice, before the century's upheavals reshaped everything.