The “kala–admi” and the “golden-haired, fair-complexioned hero”: Racial Othering and the Question of the Aboriginals in the Fairy Tale Collections of Colonial Bengal

Abstract

This article discusses how the representational politics of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengali fairy tales was heavily informed by the racial discourses of the time. The racial discourses of colonial Bengal worked in close association with the discourses of anthropology and nationalism. The discourse of ethnographic nationalism prepared the ground for the historical rise of the Hindu, upper-caste, urban, elite, male subjectivity and enabled it to define and “speak” for the so-called “aboriginal” groups in a way that best suited their convenience. The contemporary idea of the “black,” “ugly,”“backward,” and “uncivilized” aboriginals influenced the representation of the rakshasas or the giants in the fairy tales of colonial Bengal. The article analyzes the ways in which the project of fairy tale collection turned into an upper-caste, Hindu, elite discourse in the hands of the Bengali intellectuals, which operated primarily by marginalizing the category of the aboriginals. The article also historically contextualizes the categories of the elite and the aboriginal in connection with the arya-anarya theory of race, popular in nineteenth-century Bengal.