Tale
The Make-Believe Prince
ক্ষীরের পুতুল
Abanindranath Tagore · 1896
Synopsis
The king of Deepnagar has two queens. He showers the younger, Suorani, with seven palaces, seven hundred maidservants and the jewels of seven kingdoms, and relegates the elder, Duorani, to a dilapidated house, with a deaf and mute servant and torn clothes. A cunning and devoted monkey sets out to win the king's favour back for the neglected queen, and a doll fashioned from kheer, that thickened sweet milk, is to pass for a prince.
Context
Abanindranath found the story in the notebook in which Mrinalini Devi, the wife of his uncle Rabindranath, noted tales collected from village women, and he rewrote it after her death. He mixed in popular Bengali nursery rhymes and himself illustrated the first edition with six drawings. The tale has been translated into English, French, Swedish and Spanish, but its first critical edition, in English, dates only from 2018.
Who it is for
A short children's tale, in Bengali, scattered with nursery rhymes; two English translations exist, one of them a critical edition.
Prizes and reception
Regarded in Bengal as a classic of children's literature, which almost all Bengali children have read or heard.
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