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The Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales From India
A.K. Ramanudan (ed), with a Preface by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 ISBN 0-520-20399-2
When A.K. Ramanujan died in Chicago in 1993, this collection of oral tales in Kannada, a Dravidian language of South India, was incomplete. He had finished translating the stories, had provided notes for several, but had not been able to write an introduction or one of his long, analytical afterwords, so instructive in his brilliant translations of classical Tamil poetry (Hymns for the Drowning, 1981; Poems of Love And War, 1985). Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes who edited the manuscript left Ramanujan's notes to the stories incomplete, but added a preface which is in part a critical appreciation of Ramanujan's work as a folklorist, especially in his understanding of the tale's aesthetic, its structure, formal and linguistic features and analysis of its hidden meanings and significance.
While Ramanujan did not collect all of the 77 stories in the book, he knew them well, using them in his lectures and interpreting their form and symbolism with students-he trained many young folklorists in Chicago and South India. His knowledge of India's classical and modern regional languages and cultures enabled him to unravel the simplest story into many inter-twining meanings, from linguistic linkages and a psychoanalytical approach to the themes and motifs that recur in the stories.
Indian oral stories in the regional languages and dialects reflect a very different world from the mythic and legendary Sanskritic realm of gods and semi-divine heroes. In one of his last...