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FOLKTALES FROM INDIA: A SELECTION OF ORAL TALES FROM TWENTY-TWO LANGUAGES, edited by A. K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: Viking/Penguin India, 1993. xxxii + 349 pages. Rs. 250/=.
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF INDIAN GHOST STORIES, edited by Ruskin Bond. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1993. xiv + 181 pages. Rs. 85/=.
Once told, a tale finishes one round, and always awaits another teller, another round. "Every tale here is only one telling," cautions A. K. Ramanujan prefacing his collection, "held down in writing for the nonce till you or someone else reads it, brings it to life, and changes it by retelling it." A mini-theatrical ensemble, a tale carries much else besides its text--the context that invites the telling, the responses it evokes, the metamorphic potential of its scenic particulars in each region, culture or mind. Collected in print, the tales seem to lose somewhat of the life we value in the conditions of their performance. Ramanujan is aware of this. He arranges his tales, therefore, in "cycles" rather than in thematic series, much as he would "arrange a book of poems, so that they are in dialogue with each other and together create a world through point and counterpoint."
One couldn't have asked for more. The Introduction to Folktales from India affords us a panoramic view of the vast and exciting "field" of a folklorist--rural communities and families, wayside inns and resthouses, factory and kitchen, streets and suburbs, even public transport--in fact, any of those places where people meet or are in hurried transit, exchange greetings and begin to form themselves into small verbal communities. A folktale turns up almost anywhere, anytime. It surfaces mostly by allusion, occasionally as a gentle prod to move a cumbersome narrative through, or simply to break the ice. It confirms the solidarity of a group that shares certain knowledge and values on predictably equal terms. This is much truer, remarks Ramanujan, of the tales from the non-Sanskrit, non-literate, oral traditions in India. The advantage of breaking the time-honored barriers between the classical (Sanskrit, Pali), and the desi (folk/popular/regional) traditions is in the synoptic view of "an interacting cultural continuum" that results. The tales themselves testify to a larger cultural matrix of folk forms, narrative conventions and modes, and to...