ABSTRACT
“Odia Folktales” constitutes a pioneering attempt at developing a critical framework for a systematic study of the folktale, which at the time of its publication (1902) was yet to gain the status of a respectable literary form. It may be mentioned here that the growing interest in the collection and publication of folktales becomes discernible in late nineteenth-century Odisha. The immediate provocation for Mohini Mohan Senapati’s essay can be traced to Gopal Chandra Prahraj’s “simplistic” account of the origin of folktales. Adopting an incisive taxonomical approach, Mohini Mohan classifies folktales from Odisha into useful categories. This reminds one of and interestingly anticipates the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktales (1928) where Propp analyses folktales in terms of stock characters and their clearly defined functions. Mohini Mohan undertakes close content analysis to reach insightful conclusions about the moral and emotional world portrayed in folktales. He pays particular attention to the role imagination plays in folktales and sharply contrasts it with the role realism plays in modern novels. He locates the former in the world of orality and memory, and the latter in a world governed by pen and paper. He dismisses the assumption that folktales are the products of naïve and unsophisticated ways of experiencing and understanding the world by focussing upon their layered richness and complexity. In doing so the essayist creates a valuable space where the folktale could be examined as a serious literary form deserving of nuanced critical analysis.
