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This paper explores drought and famine, commonly called akal, in Rajasthani folklore as more than an environmental catastrophe. The folktales under study are: “Asha Amardhan” (“Eternal Hope”), “The Thakar’s Ghost,” and “Capturing the Clouds.” These stories present disaster as displaced across social life, featuring hunger, abandonment, greed, hoarding, caste power, and moral failure to show how Rajasthani imagination sees disaster as socially produced rather than purely natural. Their narrative forms mimic the slow, cumulative force of famine and the distinct vulnerability it produces.
Priya Mahala, Ashok Singh Rao. “Akal in Rajasthani Folktales: The Social Life of Famine.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 722-735. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.44.
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