Abol tabol is a collection of Bengali children's poems and rhymes composed by Sukumar Ray, first published on 19 September 1923 by U. Ray and Sons publishers. It consists of 46 titled and seven untitled short rhymes, all considered to be in the genre of literary nonsense.
Significance
readers were exposed to a new nonsensefantasy world by the poems in Abol Tabol. This selection offers the best of Sukumar Ray's world of pun-riddled poetry. Although it was not understood at the time of its publication, many poems in Abol Tabol contain skilfully hidden satire on the state of society and administration of early 20th-century colonial India - mostly Bengal. Embedding implied hidden meanings of a subversive nature in nonsense rhymes for children, was Ray's clever way of subverting press censorship by the then British administration in India, which was paranoid about seditious and subversive literature. In analytical literature since 2017, the poems in Abol Tabol have been plotted on a timeline and compared with contemporaneous events, research having yielded plausible connections between historical events and the commentary and satire hidden in many of the poems.
Publication history
Sukumar Ray wrote for the children's magazineSandesh, started by his father Upendrakishore, in Calcutta, right from the time of its first publication in 1913. Ray was living in England at that time, where he had traveled at the end of 1911, to study photoengraving and lithography. He returned to India towards the end of 1913, and, after the death of Upendrakishore in 1915, also became the editor of Sandesh, and remained so till the time of his own untimely death in 1923. The poems in Abol Tabol, most of which first appeared in Sandesh, were composed during the period 1915 to 1923. Abol Tabol, meaning The Weird and the Absurd, was originally the name designating a section within Sandesh magazine, where many of these poems were first published. Thirty-nine poems and seven untitled quatrains can be traced back to having first appeared in Sandesh. Seven other poems making up the balance of the collection known as Abol Tabol were selected by Ray, from perhaps previously unpublished manuscripts, to form part of the final collection. Of these, Ray wrote the first and last poems, both originally titled Abol-Tabol, specifically for the collection, possibly in 1923.
Characters
His collection had several characters which became legendary in Bengali literature and culture. Some characters even have found idiomatic usage in the language. Some of the most famous characters in "Abol tabol" are:
