Budhani: a Tharu fable refabulatedCEFR B1
31 Jul 2025
Adapted from Sanjib Chaudhary, Global Voices • CC BY 3.0
Photo by Philippe Murray-Pietsch, Unsplash
"Budhani" began as an Indigenous Tharu folktale and was refabulated into a novella by Prawin Adhikari. The story follows a crow who becomes human and is reborn as a girl in a society dominated by men. The narrative combines the struggle against legal and social injustice with scenes of love and close, intimate conversations between a mother and her children.
Adhikari said his source material came from two folktales collected by Krishna Sarbahari. Those tales later formed the basis for a short play by the Actors' Studio and were only six or seven pages long together. He said he took the seed of those stories and developed a new, original fable, writing scenes from both the crow's and the girl's perspectives and calling his process mostly mechanical.
Indu Tharu translated and rewrote the novella into the Tharu language. She grew up with a family who published a magazine called Muktik Dagar, and she became active in the Tharuhat Movement in the mid-2010s. Writing Budhani helped her recover peculiar Tharu words with help from others, and she plans to write more about Tharu women's experiences.
Difficult words
- folktale — a traditional story told by a community
- novella — a short novel, longer than a short story
- narrative — a story or a way of telling events
- injustice — unfair treatment or lack of justice
- translate — to change words into another languagetranslated
- rewrite — to write again in a different wayrewrote
- dominate — to have control or power over othersdominated
- peculiar — strange or unusual in a noticeable way
Tip: hover, focus or tap highlighted words in the article to see quick definitions while you read or listen.
Discussion questions
- Why do you think the author chose to write scenes from both the crow's and the girl's perspectives?
- How can translating stories into a local language help the people who speak that language?
- Do stories about social injustice and family relationships change the way people think? Why or why not?
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