6 highlights
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It was during the 1970s that Indian folklorists trained in the US began to conduct a scientific study of Indian folklore, which led to their classification according to different schemes.
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One of the most notable folklorists to analyse folklore in an Indian context was poet and scholar AK Ramanujan.
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The most remarkable thing about folktales is their fluidity. In his Preface to Folktales from India, the author says, “no selection can truly ‘represent’ the multiple and changing lives of Indian tales.”
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The scholarly discussion belies the fact that folktales are “the literature of the dialects, those mother tongues of villages, street, kitchen, tribal hut, and wayside tea shop.”
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Ramanujan says, “It is well known that such folklore items, like many other sorts of items in cultural exchange, are autotelic: that is, they travel by themselves without (often) any movement of populations. A proverb, a riddle, a joke, a story, a remedy, or a recipe travels every time it is told. It crosses linguistic boundaries any time a bilingual person tells it or hears it.”
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Ramanujan groups the tales into eleven cycles, each of which comprises at least one tale from each of the following categories: male-centered tales, women-centered tales, tales about families, tales about fate, gods, demons, and such, humorous tales, animal tales, and stories about stories.