Grandma and the Great Gourd is a short and sweet folklore from Eastern India from the region of Bengal. I don’t recall my Amma, who had Bengali heritage, ever telling me this tale. She was full of tales of princes and princesses instead. 🙂 It is quite amazing reading a tale I wasn’t familiar with and seeing the patterns of the tales she would tell me.
Grandma and the Great Gourd: A Bengali Folktale
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Susy Pilgrim Waters (Illustrator) | Goodreads
On her way to visit her daughter on the other side of the jungle, Grandma encounters a hungry fox, bear, and tiger, and although she convinces them to wait for her return trip, she still must find a way to outwit them all.
Grandma and the Great Gourd – Review
In Grandma and the Great Gourd, grandma is an old lady living by a forest. Her daughter lives on the other side of the forest and when grandma gets a letter from her daughter asking her to come visit, grandma agrees. The sentiments of love and family are portrayed succinctly. The story depicts the values of regularly visiting with family, growing a garden (something my Amma loved too) and living in harmony with nature. Grandma had loyal dogs that she could not take with her to her daughter’s house but she knew she could count on to take care of her home while she was away. All of my Amma’s tales centred around family. If there weren’t parrots in the tales then there were definitely flowers.
Repetition is an important part of children’s tales. I wonder if it shows that the same situations arise in different flavours over the course of our lives and there are many ways of handling them. On her journey through the forest, grandma encounters a fox, a bear and a tiger. Each of them is hungry and wants to eat her. She thinks fast and the same excuse – that she won’t be very delicious as she hasn’t been eating much – works on all of them. She reaches her daughter safely and hopes to find a solution before heading back.
After spending a lovely time at her daughter’s, grandma now has to get back home. The two of them devise a plan – they will fit her inside an enormous hollowed out gourd and hopefully, the animals will be tricked again. As a child listening to the story, there would be awe, wonder and excitement on fitting into a gourd and rolling around on the forest floor. Chuckles when the animals would be tricked to believe it’s just a strange, huge gourd that talks. I would probably do an exercise of making a hollow gourd with my kids to get our hands dirty. It will not be as enormous as the one in the story though. 😉
Grandma and the Great Gourd has a lot to offer in a few words and simple prose. The illustrations of the book remind me of the colorfulness and textures of home. The tales from my childhood memories had decent forest cover and tigers too. It was good to see geographical and cultural roots both represented in this book, and most amazingly, it felt great to find this book at my local library in Canada, miles away from my childhood home.
Add this Children’s book to your Goodreads TBR to share with the kids in your life.
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