Article by: Poorva Agarwal
Edited by: Jenica Amalita
I woke up singing:
“Saat Bhaiyaan ki bhaan Brindebai, daanan chugti ne modiye bulaayi,
Ghaaale maai bhiksha, jogi marego.”
Sister of Seven Brothers, Brindebai; she was sorting wheat when the wanderer called out:
“Give me alms, Sister else the sage will grow angry.”
The refrain from a story my grandmother used to tell me played in my head like a broken record. It often did. But that evening, as I gazed into the dusk, the familiar song felt almost eerie.
My grandmother told me many stories like this, usually at bedtime, often in Marwari and dialectical Hindi. Like many oral narratives, they lived not in books but in memory. When I tried to reconstruct the story of Brindebai, I realised something unsettling: the narrative existed nowhere except in fragments of my own recollection.
The refrain was the clearest fragment.
“Saat Bhaiyaan ki bhaan Brindebai…
Ghaaale maai bhiksha, jogi marego.”
From the refrain, the first scene of the folkstory returned slowly.
Brindebai was sorting grain when a bhikshuk called out for alms. If she did not help him, he warned, the jogi would beat him.
She did help him, and even to a young girl listening to this story for the first time, it came as no surprise. It was obvious that she would help him, even before those words could be articulated in the narrative.
The Abduction Trope and the Double-Bind of Boundary Crossing
There is another woman we know from mythology whose narrative follows a strangely similar turn. In the Ramayana, Sita’s abduction follows her act of compassion toward what appears to be a holy wanderer (Ravana in disguise). Folklorists classify similar stories under the motifs “deceptive visitors” and “abduction of the bride.” It is a pattern that recurs across epic and folk traditions and can be found catalogued in international folktale indices such as ATU 311 (Fitcher’s Bird) and ATU 312 (Bluebeard) (Uther, 2004).
Scholars such as Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes have drawn attention to how many fairy tales hinge on moments when women’s curiosity, kindness, or hospitality become the very mechanisms through which danger enters the narrative. In her analysis of Grimm tales such as Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Bird, Tatar (2003) notes that female protagonists are often placed in situations where seemingly ordinary acts, like opening a door, asking a question or extending help are later reframed as moral failures once violence unfolds. Curiosity or compassion becomes transgression in retrospect.
Zipes (1983) similarly argues that fairy tales historically functioned as socialising narratives that discipline behaviour, particularly female behaviour, by attaching catastrophic consequences to seemingly small moments of disobedience or boundary-crossing. In his reading of The Red Riding Hood, for example, a little girl’s curiosity becomes the narrative explanation of a violence that seems inordinate in proportion.
Seen this way, abduction is not merely a plot device. It performs cultural work. These stories encode anxieties about women crossing boundaries and about the risks embedded in acts of kindness or curiosity.
However, they also produce a curious narrative paradox. Let us return to the story of Brindebai.
In the story, she is busy with her chores when a beggar calls to her for alms. When she hears this call, she is drawn to respond to the beggar. As a listener/reader of the story, one also expects Brindebai to respond to the beggar. His warning ‘jogi marego’ (the master will beat me) creates a kind of pathos that seems impossible not to respond to, narratively speaking. Eventually, the beggar abducts her and she is left without any recourse.
Her action is framed as a misjudgment in retrospect. The narrative carries an implicit suggestion that she ought to have known better.
Yet, in the precise moment when the beggar called for alms – if she had refused to help, that would have been seen as moral failure. In the telling of the story, it seems like helping the beggar was almost forewritten.
In this manner, Brindebai’s story appears to place its heroine within a narrative bind. The moment that precipitates the crisis is not an act of rebellion but an act of care. She responds to a plea for help, extending the hospitality that many moral traditions hold as virtuous. Yet the story immediately reframes this act as the mistake that sets catastrophe in motion. In doing so, the narrative creates an uneasy contradiction. If Brindebai had refused the beggar, she might be read as lacking compassion; yet because she responds, she is punished for crossing a boundary she was meant to respect.
The story thus positions the heroine in an impossible moral terrain: she must embody kindness, but she must also know when not to act on it. The narrative does not offer her the space to deliberate or recognise the deception. Instead, the crossing appears almost forewritten, making her both the agent of the action and the figure blamed for its consequences.
The result is a cautionary structure that disciplines movement without offering a clear ethical resolution. The story does not simply depict danger; it subtly relocates responsibility for that danger onto the heroine who crossed the boundary. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen suggests, monstrous figures often emerge in response to transgressions of social or moral codes, functioning as both threat and warning.
Here, however, this dynamic is complicated: the figure of danger is masked, and it is not vice but an act of virtue that precipitates harm. In this case, what is being policed is not transgression but virtue itself. In this sense, morality appears constrained by a patriarchal social order, producing a narrative in which ethical action becomes indistinguishable from transgression.
A False Hero’s Journey
To fully contextualise Brindebai’s narrative arc, it would be useful to juxtapose it with Joseph Campbell’s framework of the ‘Hero’s Journey’, one of the most influential frameworks for understanding the protagonist’s character arc in mythic narratives.
Campbell’s model describes a recurring narrative structure in which a protagonist leaves the ordinary world after receiving a “call to adventure,” crosses a threshold into unfamiliar territory, confronts trials and adversaries, and ultimately returns home transformed. The journey, in Campbell’s formulation, is not merely about survival but about transformation: the protagonist emerges from the ordeal changed.
At first glance, Brindebai’s abduction might be interpreted as the necessary rupture that propels the heroine into growth; it is similar to the kind of “call to adventure” that Campbell describes in the Hero’s Journey. If Brindebai were to confront the danger, defeat the villain, and return transformed, the crossing of the boundary could be read as a moment of learning or coming of age.
Yet, the structure of Brindebai’s story resists this framework. Brindebai does not deliberate about whether to accept the call, nor does she appear to embark on a chosen quest. She has no mentor or guide either. Instead, the narrative suggests that her response to the beggar’s call was itself a mistake and that she should have known better.
Feminist mythographer Maureen Murdock has argued that Campbell’s model inadequately captures women’s narrative arcs. In The Heroine’s Journey, Murdock proposes that many stories involving female protagonists are structured not around conquest and triumph but around negotiation with constraint and fragmentation.Rather than embarking on aspirational adventures, women often encounter narratives that discipline their movement or punish their transgression.
Brindebai’s abduction appears to follow precisely this pattern. The event does not initiate a heroic quest but instead reinforces the boundaries she was not meant to cross.
The Haunting
The story appears to end with a resolution. In the forest, after a series of confrontations where Brindebai’s brothers take the forefront, the kidnapper dies. Brindebai returns home. The danger, it would seem, has passed.
But the story does not end there. And here is where the story of Brindebai leaves the reader curious:
Once the antagonist dies, his ‘spirit’ enters a tree. Years later, a woodcutter chops the tree and sells the wood, which is purchased by a craftsman who makes flutes out of this wood. The flute-seller then wanders around the neighbourhood, playing a sweet melody on this flute.
The notes reach Brindebai through her window, while she is busy doing her chores. And this is what she hears in the melody of the flute:
“Saat Bhaiyaan ki bhaan Brindebai,
daanan chugti ne modiye bulaayi,
Ghaaale maai bhiksha, jogi marego.”
Sister of Seven Brothers, Brindebai;
she was sorting wheat when the wanderer called out:
“Give me alms, Sister else the sage will grow angry.”
Years later, she can still hear that familiar refrain, the reminder of a breached boundary and the violence that ensued.
She is haunted, and the haunting exists not just in her memory – but is transformed into ordinary life. It comes to her, in the most innocuous manner, through sound. The haunting enters through something as ordinary as music. It does not announce itself as danger; it arrives as melody. The extraordinary violence of the past is absorbed into the textures of everyday life.
The narrative does not resolve oppression; it displaces it. What begins as an external threat returns as an internal condition. The violence is no longer something that happens to Brindebai but becomes something she carries.
The fear of violence is no longer located in the world; it is relocated within the protagonist. This relocation is not incidental. It ensures that even in the absence of the oppressor, the conditions of fear persist.
A gendered reading of the tale cannot be avoided, and it begs the question that if this protagonist were to follow the typical ‘hero’s journey’—how would the story end?
If the story were to follow a heroic arc, this moment would mark closure – the return after an ordeal, the point at which the protagonist emerges transformed. But here, the return does not bring resolution. It brings repetition.
The question that continues to stay with me is simple, disturbing and merits serious consideration: Why does Brindebai, in a story that centres her, remain marked as the victim even at its end?
It is my understanding that the answer to this question lies in the way her name is constructed “Saat bhaiyan ki bhaan, Brindebai”, stating her role before her name. Her identity comes from her role.
The failure of resolution suggests that the victory in the story does not belong to her. It is her brothers who save her, who kill the oppressor and in that sense move her journey forward. This pattern, too, echoes widely across folklore traditions. Stories such as Saat Bhai Champa in Bengal and The Seven Ravens (ATU 451) similarly position the sister as the emotional centre while male siblings enact physical rescue or vengeance.
Folklore scholarship has long noted that such sibling-cycle narratives mobilise female suffering as the catalyst for male action (Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature; Uther).
The sister becomes indispensable to the story, yet her agency remains displaced. While she is permitted moral agency (most clearly in her decision to respond to the beggar) she is also denied the capacity to act in her own defence.
Her vulnerability legitimises the brothers’ heroism, but does nothing to restore her agency. In this sense, patriarchal structures appear to delineate the limits of her agency, enabling ethical action while foreclosing the possibility of self-preservation.
The story resolves the event through them, but leaves its imprint on her.
Perhaps this is why the haunting lingers. The story offers rescue, but not release. The haunting reveals that while the narrative resolves the event, it does not resolve its impact. The oppressor’s voice is not silenced but preserved, and even granted a troubling narrative afterlife that continues to reach the heroine long after the danger has passed. In this sense, the story suggests that rescue cannot undo the conditions of fear it produces; without agency over the experience itself, the heroine remains bound to it. The danger is removed from the world, yet it continues to live within her, returning again and again in the form of a song she cannot escape.
Does folklore provide women with an archetype to aspire to?
Hence comes the deepest question I have, as a little girl who listened to her grandmother’s stories wide-eyed, and today, as a woman trying to find inspiration and narrative frameworks to live by – Does folklore provide women with an archetype to aspire to? If folklore often provides aspirational templates through heroes who confront danger and return with wisdom, Brindebai’s story offers something different. It teaches that the heroine is to be beloved, rescued, and protected.
It does not offer her an archetype of her own power. The story appears to celebrate her return home, but its deeper structure suggests otherwise. Even after the oppressor dies, his voice continues to echo through the flute.
The danger never fully disappears. It merely changes form. In doing so, it leaves the imprint of a narrative of near-but-incomplete freedom on girls and young women listening to this story. We carry it forward across generations, unquestioningly. However, the true work of carrying cultural inheritance forward is to let it shift with the times.
What if we were to question the narrative? What if we were to re-write it, such that Brindebai paused when she heard the beggar’s call? What if she recognised the deception? What if the confrontation with danger belonged to her story alone?
How would our rewriting of this tale change who we see ourselves as, change the way we narrate ourselves into the roles society demarcates for us?
Folklore evolves because stories are retold. The stories our grandmothers carried were shaped by the worlds they lived in. The stories we carry forward need not remain unchanged.
Perhaps the haunting refrain, the singing I woke up to was that call.
A call not only to remember, but to respond. To hear, to remember the flute… but finally, to change the song.
BIO: Poorva Agarwal is a writer, educator, and creative practitioner working at the intersection of language, narrative, and identity. With over a decade of experience in language arts and critical pedagogy, her work explores how stories shape agency and selfhood. She has authored children’s books and develops process-based writing practices that foreground voice, reflection, and meaning-making across educational and creative contexts.
References:
Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (3rd ed.). New World Library. (Original work published 1949)
Cohen, J. J. (1996). Monster culture (Seven theses). In J. J. Cohen (Ed.), Monster theory: Reading culture (pp. 3–25). University of Minnesota Press.
Murdock, M. (1990). The heroine’s journey: Woman’s quest for wholeness. Shambhala Publications.
Tatar, M. (2003). The hard facts of the Grimms’ fairy tales (Expanded 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.
Thompson, S. (1955–1958). Motif-index of folk literature (Vols. 1–6). Indiana University Press.
Uther, H.-J. (2004). The types of international folktales: A classification and bibliography (Vols. 1–3). Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Zipes, J. (1983). The trials and tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the tale in sociocultural context. Bergin & Garvey.