Brightening Kongu folktales from his dark world

A sparrow went in search of food for his hungry female. On its way back home, while drinking nectar from a fragrant thaazhampoo (screw pine flower), it gets caught in the flower, as it closes in the dusk. Then the little bird, as described in a folk tale, had no other option, but to stay inside the dark space enveloped by the flower. A. S Mohanagiri, who rendered this story into English, could have felt the pain of the sparrow more than anyone since he knows how life would be in a dark world with himself being a visually challenged man. Nevertheless, his disability did not deter him from rendering twenty-five such folk tales into English and anthologising them into an e-book in the Kindle app, which has received an acclaimed five-star review.

Titled as Bed-time stories for Grown-ups: Folktales from India, the tales have been 'trans-created' into English from the Tamil book Kongu Naattupura Kadhaikal: Thokuppum Aayvum, penned by M Senthil Kumar, who was a professor of Tamil in the Government Arts College, Coimbatore. Senthil has also been editing the UGC-listed magazine Peyal, a journal for Tamil research and studies.

“After receiving Senthil Kumar’s book in the PDF format, I went through the complete folktales he had collected and compiled. The screen-reading software NVDA (Non-visual Desktop Access), specially designed for the visually-challenged people, is an amazing product of information technology, helped me render the folktales into English. As the software reads the e-scripts of all Indian languages, it reads to me the complete folktales in Tamil. Having listened to it, I typed the tales in English on my computer, again with the help of the software. Bearing testimony to the fact that the areas in information technology are so surprising, the software, while you type, informs everything in its voice as spelling and grammatical errors, selection of font sizes and font colours, paragraphing and so on. I am grateful for such wonderful technology, which has guided me in making my first e-book. As I have trans-created the local tales to take them to new horizons, the book never hinders a foreign reader in his smooth journey of reading it. I took around a couple of months to produce this book.”

Prof Mohanagiri, who is also an alumnus of the Government Arts College, says that the folktales of the Kongu region, which were passed down by word of mouth, reflect how life was in the bygone era.

“To render them into English, I chose around 25 folktales that reflect the lives lived by our forefathers. For instance, the tale of the sparrow, which goes in search of food for its female, fails to return home by night and gets chided by its female the next morning. The tale is a symbolic depiction of a yesteryear Kongu family which bound husbands to return home by night wherever they went for work” Mohanagiri points out.

A Coimbatorean, Mohanagiri dedicated his e-book “To my friend Lord Muruga of Maruthamalai”

“Yes. The Almighty Lord Muruga has been my close friend ever since my childhood!” says Mohanagiri.