In praise of Mymensingh’s Bangla folk ballads mobidur@gmail.com Thu, 04/14/2022 - 00:00 .full-viewport-wrapper img { width: 100%; object-fit: cover; object-position: center; height: 100%; max-height: calc(100vh - 71px); } Image Caption COLLAGE: KAZI AKIB BIN ASAD In praise of Mymensingh’s Bangla folk ballads Folk-ballads are living archives that represent the imagination, values, ideas, and aesthetics of the people to whom they belong. Bangla literature has a rich repertoire of folk ballads. We are, however, quite oblivious of this treasure trove and, therefore, there is a dearth of research on these folk elements.Czech Indologist Dusan Zbavitel's Bengali Folk-Ballads From Mymensingh And The Problem Of Their Authenticity can be called a wonderful exception in this regard.
It is considered to be the first literary study of the beautiful folk-ballads from Mymensingh. The study was published by the University of Calcutta in 1963. A brief background of the book may not be irrelevant here.
In 1923, Rai Bahadur Dineshchandra Sen edited a volume of epic songs from the Mymensingh District of the then Eastern Bengal under the title Maimansimha-gitika. The ballads were mainly collected by Chandra Kumar De, a literary activist from the area. In the following years, Dineshchandra published three more volumes of balladic texts containing epic songs from different parts of Eastern Bengal.
The beautiful ballads received enthusiastic response and admiration in India and abroad. However, for some scholars these ballads were too good, and they shared doubts about the antiquity, authenticity and folk character of these lores. Dusan Zbavitel found this uncertainty "highly regrettable" and undertook a study to assign to the ballads their proper place—"one of the high points of Bengali literature".
Dr Zbavitel tried to find out: "what is it that makes them so excellent?"Zbavitel confined his analysis to the study of the ballads originating in Mymensingh—41 ballads containing more than 21,000 verses. He took an arduous effort of analysing each of these 41 ballads to prove their originality and, I must say, he achieved his goal with marked success.One key argument put forward by Zbavitel in favour of the originality of the gitikas from Mymensingh is that these ballads are not collected by a single person and, still, there are similarities among the ballads: identical images, and …
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