On these pages we meet adventurous princes, romantic princesses, wily peasants, tricky animals--and an abundance of monsters, djinns, gods, goddesses, and powerful magicians. In colorful, exotic settings reminiscent of The Arabian Nights, brave heroes and virtuous heroines triumph over the forces of evil, often with fantastical or comic results. These folktales, collected orally in the desert state of Rajasthan in 1986-87, are eloquent reflections of the great cultural traditions of India, and are stories that bring enchantment to audiences everywhere.

The first single volume collection of classic Hindi folktales by translators William Crooke and Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube. In 1891, at a time when the study of India was primarily based on ancient texts, coins, and material remains, William Crooke dared to focus on living India—its everyday culture, age-old customs, and fictional narratives. With Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube, he recorded and published, over a period of six years, a remarkable collection of folktales from northern India. The tales reflect the tapestry of social and personal lives of this region, the epicenter of a revolt against British rule in 1857. Although many of the tales were published in British ethnographic journals, a number of the manuscripts, in Chaube's handwriting, were unpublished; others existed only as old microfilm in a New Delhi library. Never before have they appeared as a single volume or been available in any one library or archive.

The book is a traditional form of narrative, orally transmitted and one of the most significant genre of folk-lore.

This book of oral tales from the south Indian region of Kannada represents the culmination of a lifetime of research by A. K. Ramanujan, one of the most revered scholars and writers of his time. The result of over three decades' labor, this long-awaited collection makes available for the first time a wealth of folktales from a region that has not yet been adequately represented in world literature. Ramanujan's skill as a translator, his graceful writing style, and his profound love and understanding of the subject enrich the tales that he collected, translated, and interpreted. With a written literature recorded from about 800 A.D., Kannada is rich in mythology, devotional and secular poetry, and more recently novels and plays. Ramanujan, born in Mysore in 1929, had an intimate knowledge of the language. In the 1950s, when working as a college lecturer, he began collecting these tales from everyone he could--servants, aunts, schoolteachers, children, carpenters, tailors. In 1970 he began translating and interpreting the tales, a project that absorbed him for the next three decades. When Ramanujan died in 1993, the translations were complete and he had written notes for about half of the tales. With its unsentimental sympathies, its laughter, and its delightfully vivid sense of detail, the collection stands as a significant and moving monument to Ramanujan's memory as a scholar and writer.

Folktales in India have been told, heard, read and celebrated for many centuries. In breaking new ground, Indian folktales have been reread and examined in the light of the Mother Earth discourse as it manifests in the lifeworlds of women, nature and language. The book introduces ecofeminist criticism and situates it within an innovative folktale typology to connect women and environment through folklore. The book proposes an innovative paradigm inspired by the beehive to analyze motifs, relationships, concerns, worldviews and consciousness of indigenous women and men who live close to nature as well as other socially marginalized groups. In the current global context fraught with challenges for ecology and hopes for sustainable development, this book with its interdisciplinary approach will interest scholars and researchers of literature, environmental studies, gender studies and cultural anthropology.