Preserve our folktales
An essay published in Star Literature on 16/3/13 sent a chill down my spine realising how people destroyed books -- the reservoir of knowledge -- so widely in a planned way! Since ancient times notorious people conducted nefarious operations to annihilate books.
Besides this type of heinous act to exterminate knowledge, our ignorance of the need to preserve literature may sometimes force them go into oblivion. Even a decade ago, in most rural areas there was the practice of telling folk stories. People of all ages, from children to older people would gather in open places at night to listen to numerous folk tales about kings, queens, ghosts, monsters, talking birds, beasts, trees and so on.
Unfortunately, modernisation has changed the practice of telling and listening to folk stories. People have various other sources to entertain themselves other than listening to such stories. Nowadays we can hardly find a story-teller in a village. The saddest aspect of it is that the unique folk stories have started to become rxtinct as many of the stories have not been preserved in writing.
Dinesh Chandra Sen and Jasim Uddin have done a great job by collecting a lot of folklore literatures. We need to make efforts to preserve the rest of the stories before our Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandma'sack of folktales) loses all its treasure.
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