author
Cecil Henry Bompas
1868–1956
A British civil servant in colonial India, he is best remembered for bringing Santal oral storytelling to English readers. His work opens a window onto the folklore, beliefs, and everyday imagination of the Santal Parganas in the early twentieth century.
1 Audiobook
Folklore of the Santal Parganas
by Cecil Henry Bompas
About the author
Born in London on May 31, 1868, Cecil Henry Bompas was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Indian Civil Service in the late 1880s and spent much of his career in Bengal, where his official work brought him into close contact with local communities and languages.
Alongside his administrative career, he became known as a folklorist and translator. He is most closely associated with Folklore of the Santal Parganas (1909), a collection that helped preserve and share stories of the Santal people with English-language readers. Because of that book, he is remembered less as a novelist than as a recorder of traditional tales and beliefs.
Bompas died on January 22, 1956, in Broughton, Hampshire. Today, his name survives mainly through his contributions to South Asian folklore studies and through the continued circulation of his translated collections in libraries and public-domain editions.