Kajalrekha (Bengali folk ballad)

Kajalrekha (Bengali: কাজলরেখা) is a Bengali folk ballad collected in the work Maimansingha Gitika, containing ballads from Mymensingh, Bengal. It tells the story of a girl that is destined to marry a seemingly dead man, who is, in reality, under a curse, his body prickled by numerous needles. The girl begins a task of removing the needles to revive the prince, but a servant replaces her and claims the prince's resurrection as her doing. Finally, after some misandventures, a bird reveals Kajalrekha's story to a gathering of people, which alerts the prince of the truth.

The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 894, "The Ghoulish Schoolmaster and the Stone of Pity", for the alternate object the heroine may tell her tale to, but, before the 2004 revision, it was indexed as type AaTh 437, "The Needle Prince".

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