The Legend of Khana
Bengali folk wisdom (Khanar Bachan) · Ages 8-12 · 5 min read
Long ago in Bengal there lived a girl named Khana, and she had a most remarkable gift. She could read the sky. By watching the stars, the clouds, the way the wind turned and the birds flew, she could tell when the rains would come, when to plant the rice and when to hold back, when a storm was on its way. And she did not keep her knowledge to herself. She put it into short, simple rhymes that any farmer could remember, plain little sayings about the seasons and the soil and the weather.
Now this was no small thing. To a farmer, knowing the right day to sow can mean the difference between a full harvest and a hungry year. So the country people loved Khana, and they learned her rhymes by heart, and they passed them along from neighbour to neighbour and field to field.
Khana had married into a family of learned court astrologers, men whose whole work was reading the heavens for the king. But here was the awkward thing. Whenever the wise men of the court got their predictions wrong, it was Khana, quietly, who got them right. Word of it spread, until people said openly that the cleverest astronomer in the whole land was not any of the king’s scholars at all, but a woman.
The king himself heard, and was so impressed that he wished to give Khana a place of honour among his wisest counsellors. It should have been her proudest moment.
But not everyone was glad. It troubled certain proud men that a woman should be thought wiser than they were, and praised before the king for it. And so, in the cruel way the old story tells it, they found a way to silence her, and Khana spoke her wisdom aloud no more.
They thought that would be the end of it.
It was not. Because the rhymes Khana had already given away were not hers to be taken back. They were out in the world, learned and loved and living in the memory of every farming family in Bengal. Parents taught them to children, who grew up and taught them to children of their own, on and on, for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And so it is that even today, in the villages of Bengal, when a farmer looks up at a gathering sky and murmurs an old rhyme about when the rains will fall, he is speaking the words of Khana. They silenced the woman. They could never silence her wisdom.
An original retelling of the legend of Khana, the medieval Bengali woman astronomer-poet, whose sayings ('Khanar Bachan') are still repeated in rural Bengal (public domain folk tradition).
