A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.

Overview

After a man dies leaving eight children and a pregnant wife, her ninth child is born a monkey. Despite pressure to kill or reject him, she raises him in a hut outside the village. He learns human speech. When his brothers allocate him dense jungle for a field, he repeatedly leaves a hatchet embedded in a tree while spending his time elsewhere; the brothers later find his clearing larger than their own. The tale shows the result without describing the clearing process.

Having no plough, cattle or seed rice, he plants pumpkin seeds. At his first-fruits offering he cuts a pumpkin as if decapitating a fowl and discovers rice within it; the crop supplies a year’s food. Later he overhears horses discussing their speed and obtains a mare capable of travelling through the air by first secretly laming her, buying her cheaply and removing the splinter. These gains make him wealthy but do not make all of his conduct benevolent.

He subsequently withholds a bathing girl’s cloth until she agrees to marry him, carries her home and celebrates a wedding. The telling says she is won over by his conversation and wishes her companions to leave, alongside its coercive beginning. No shedding of a monkey skin or final human transformation occurs. His human birth-family and lasting marriage distinguish him from the separate, abandoned monkey husband of chapter LXX.

Human mother’s speaking monkey son who gains rice-filled pumpkins and a flying mareSpecific Santal narrative witness
01

Origins & earliest records

Santal Parganas, eastern India; source-specific Santali storytelling

02

Records & interpretation

Complete relevant tale directly read with existing collection preface and narrator-chain record.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

  1. 01

    Folklore of the Santal Parganas

    Cecil Henry Bompas, translator; O. Bodding, collector; Sagram Murmu, principal Santali writer credited in preface · 1909

    XV, The Monkey Boy, pp. 56–60

Family & connections

A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.

Primary records and illustrations

Direct primary record

Cecil Henry Bompas, Folklore of the Santal Parganas (1909)

Part I, Santal folktales. XV, The Monkey Boy, pp. 56–60

Full tale read. Monkey birth and speech explicit, no human transformation; flight without invented wings. Rice-filled pumpkins and unattended clearing described at the level actually narrated.

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References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

  1. Historical translation of collected narrativesBompas, Folklore of the Santal Parganas (1909), XV, The Monkey Boy, pp. 56–60Research access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.

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