To Tell a Tale Untold: Two Folklorists in Colonial India

Abstract

This study is based on research into an unpublished manuscript collection of the folktales of North India, compiled in the late nineteenth century. The A. recounts her own attempts to learn more about the two colonial folklorists - one Indian, the other British - who worked to produce the collection. In the process, she delves into the relationship between the two men, Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube (d.1914) and William Crooke (1848-1923), whose respective roles were much more complicated than that of stereotyped scribe or scholar. The A. proposes that contemporary scholars rethink their approaches to and assumptions about colonial folkloristics, carefully considering modes of interaction and diffusion of influence among Indians and colonial scholar-administrators. She suggests how scholars might tease out information about heretofore anonymous participants in an Indo-British colonial collectivity, which she defines as both the process and the social formations that produced colonial collections, in which folklore collectors and narrators interacted in a complex web of intercultural power relations and expectations.