Excerpt from The Folk-Literature of Bengal: Being Lectures Delivered to the Calcutta University, in 1917, as Ramtanu Lahiri Research Fellow, in the History of Bengali Language and Literature
There are few people who have not been subjected to the command, "Tell me a story," and those who, on such occasions, find pleasure in trying to make children happy, rack their brains to find something new to tell. They desire that their story should contain nothing hut thoughts full of good-will and encouragement to follow good examples. In the telling of the story it is natural to picture the details of the scene according to the story-tellers own experience. Such is the incentive from which the folk-tale is born.
To those of us who come from the West, it comes as a pleasing surprise to find in the folktales of India scenes and incidents which are familiar to us from our early reading of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Anderson's Fairy Tales. This similarity early attracted the attention of scholars and there have been controversies as to the original sources of tales common to East and West: Sir William Jones and the early Sanskrit scholars who worked with him, found two collections of these tales so complete as to leave no further doubt that the origin was, as had been surmised, in the East.
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