Essay Week 4

Opium

The Folktales of Bengal is a collection of stories from that region of the world. This unit suffered from the length of some of the stories. In particular the Origin of Opium story. This story is a simple story about how the poppy tree became to exist. The problem with this story is that it becomes repetitive. The main character which will later become the poppy tree starts out as a mouse. Then through a series of boons become different animals until finally becoming a woman that marries the king and becomes queen. The woman then falls to her death in a well and is made into the poppy tree by a Risshi. This is a simple story that could have been shortened and allowed for more room in the Unit for other stories. The enjoyable thing about Indian folk lore is that they leave room to expand on the stories so that a larger story can be told, but in this case the story seems to be expanded on too much. The mouse becomes a cat, then a dog, then ape, then a boar, then an elephant, then a woman, and finally a poppy tree. That is too many steps and half way through my reading of this story I had a feeling of “Cmon get a move on” because the repetitive nature of the story. I kept wondering how many more animals this character would become before I found out the origin of opium. I know that with other stories in folklore there are a number of different versions of the stories and with some searching I am sure that a shorter version could be found and used without hurting the message of the story. This would allow for readers to discover more stories from this region by making room in the unit. This critique however is not to say that this story was bad, just to say that in the format of this class the length works as a detriment to the discovery of other materials.

Picture Attribution

By KGM007 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons