| Summary: | This article will concentrate on the discourses that circulated around the literary genre of the Bengali fairy tale as it developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century India, especially regarding its ownership and genesis, and the interaction of this with the political/social debates/discourses surrounding the position and role of women. The discourses generated through the various prefaces and commentaries that accompanied the story collections, constructed a certain idea of the national woman as the bearer of tradition. They posit a theory of the sustenance of indigenous cultural traditions (which included story telling traditions) in her tremendous capacity for all-consuming love. At the same time, the story texts presented and focused on self-sacrificing heroines who fit into the model of indigenous womanhood that was being constructed during this period. This article will argue that these discourses were built on a series of erasures of women’s voices, life stages and emotional spectrums but were serving the purpose of proving the superiority of indigenous traditions over that of the British imperialists. This project of defending Indian tradition, a central aspect of the cultural resistance to British imperialism, was a masculinist project. It reduced women to being mere sites and objects of knowledge.
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