The Fisher-Girl and the Crab is an Indian fairy tale collected by Verrier Elwin in Folk-Tales of Mahakoshal;[1] it comes from the Kurukh, a people living in Chitrakoot, Bastar State.
[2]: 19 A childless Kurukh couple found a gourd by their rice field and started to eat it, but it begged them to cut it open gently.
[4] Professor Stuart Blackburn locates variants with the crab husband among tribal groups from India (namely, the Gondi, the Kuruk, and Santal), as well as from Burma (Shan), and northern Laos (Mien).
Eight days later, the local Rajá is summoning all the young people, men and women, to work in harvesting the fields.
However, the crab is expelled by other workers and finds another spot in the Raja's daughter's fields, where he takes off the shell and becomes a "beautiful twelve-year-old boy".
Meanwhile, Raja's daughter brings some gruel to feed the harvesters and learns of the crab working on her fields.
One night, the crab boy takes off the shell and goes to the stables to mount on his father-in-law's horses and ride them to exhaustion.
[6] Author Shovona Devi published a Bengali tale titled The Crab Prince.
Sometime later, the prince visits his daughter in the widow's new house and learns that his son-in-law becomes human by night and remains a crab by day.
The next time the now-human crab is asleep, the princess pounds his shell to dust and he stays human permanently.