The Old Woman and the Tale: Exploring the Intersection of Age and Gender within the Bengali Roopkatha

Abstract

Abstract:The Bengali literary genre of the roopkatha, tales collected from regions that now lie in West Bengal and Bangladesh, gained immense popularity during the peak of anticolonial cultural nationalism in Bengal over the turn of the twentieth century. Among its defining characteristics is its association with old women. This article studies the roopkatha's old woman at the three levels of narrative, discourse, and social history to argue that she emerges as a capacious figure who troubles binary understandings of fairy-tale characterization, universalized assumptions about old age, and assumptions about the social roles of old women in South Asia.