Old Deccan Days, or Hindoo Fairy Legends, and: Folktales from Northern India (review)

Abstract

Deccan or Hindoo Fairy Legends. Mary Frere. Edited with an introduction by Kirin Narayan. ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002. 261 pp. Folktales from Northern India. William Crooke and Pandit Ram Gharib Chaubc. Edited and with an introduction by Sadhana Naithani. ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002. 427 pp. The two volumes under review are part of a series from ABC-CLIO, Classic Folk and Fairy Tales, under editorship of ever-zealous Jack Zipes. The series, according publisher, brings back life [some] key anthologies of traditional tales from golden age of folklore discovery, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I recognized title Deccan Days', I had a copy, published in 1897 in Albany, New York. Other readers may remember it as an aging volume on a library shelf; as Kirin Narayan says in her introduction, By now every library with a substantial South Asian or folktale collection has a copy of Deccan Days, which has also been many times translated other languages (vii). The new series provides a freshly typeset but otherwise virtually unaltered edition of a classic work and each is enhanced by an authoritative introduction by a top scholar. Though both volumes offer old wine in new bottles, they differ in materials and intention. Kirin Narayan's detailed and comprehensive introduction Deccan Days identifies it as the outcome of a remarkable collaboration. Mary Frere, daughter of British governor of Bombay wrote down stories told by her servant, Anna Liberata de Souza, and published them in 1868, with her notes on teller and her fathers ethnographic commentary. Kirin Narayan discusses tales and Mary Freres editing; she recounts unexpected success of book. She then reconstructs biography of teller and points out a recurrent theme in her tales: working for a living-after all, this is substance of relationship between herself and Mary Frere (xvi). In a third section, she explains role of the famous and well-connected Sir Bartle Frere in fostering publication of his daughter's book. Through his introduction, he put tales to service of larger colonial project of typifying and generalizing about (xxi). Then Kirin Narayan discusses Mary Frere, salvaging stories that were being distorted or forgotten (xxiv), and her challenge others collect in India. The conclusion of introduction proves that Old Deccan Days is a groundbreaking and deeply original (xxvii). The twenty-four tales themselves are eminently readable, more, I think, because their Victorian vocabulary causes a reader relax into a childlike receptiveness. Folktales from Northern India also reveals collaborative role of an Indian subaltern with a colonial officer, but it is far more of a discovery. The book presents a collection of 363 Indian folktale texts, published originally in periodicals North Indian Notes and Queues and The Indian Antiquary from 1892 on. The editor was most prominent of British colonial folklorists in India, William Crooke. …