Sukumar Ray

Abol Tabol Sukumar Ray Bengali edition

Abol tabol (literally "The Weird and the Absurd") 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 named short rhymes (quatrains), all considered to be in the genre of literary nonsense. Bengali readers were exposed to a new nonsense fantasy 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.