According to folktales, Tenali Rama was a court-jester of King Krishnadevaraya of the Vijayanagar Empire. He was a witty and intelligent fellow who used his wits to solve peculiar problems and help people out of their miseries. “Tales of Tenali Rama” is a series of 10 books that compiles timeless stories of Tenali Rama and presents them in an entertaining and delightful manner. Each story bears testimony to his sharp mind, quick wit, ingenuity and wisdom. The stories are illustrated with brilliant pictures that complement the text and take the stories further.

According to folktales, Tenali Rama was a court-jester of King Krishnadevaraya of the Vijayanagar Empire. He was a witty and intelligent fellow who used his wits to solve peculiar problems and help people out of their miseries. “Tales of Tenali Rama” is a series of 10 books that compiles timeless stories of Tenali Rama and presents them in an entertaining and delightful manner. Each story bears testimony to his sharp mind, quick wit, ingenuity and wisdom. The stories are illustrated with brilliant pictures that complement the text and take the stories further.

A little boy is excited by his first airplane ride

Hymn to Tripurasundarī (Hindu deity).

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.