Excerpt from Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1919, Vol. 39
Since then the publication of Indian oral stories has been extensive and continuous to the present time. In 1914 there appeared the last volume of Mr. H. Parker"s three-volume collection of Village Folk-Tales of Ceylon, the most important work yet published in this field, containing 266 stories and indicating parallels to many of those from other collections both oral and literary.
We have now in printed form accessible to Occidental readers, in round numbers, 3000 stories from India and the adjacent countries of Ceylon, Tibet, Burma, and the Malay Peninsula. These run the gamut of folk-tale types, including myths, place and hero legends, fables, drolls, Marchen of all sorts, cumulative stories, and ballads. Altho the folk story material is not nearly exhausted, the number of tales reported is sufficiently large and representative to afford a working basis for the study of Indian folklore. Each new collection of tales that is published contains only a small amount of new material; the greater part repeats stories or motifs that have been previously reported.
Of these 3000 stories not all are oral tales. By a loose interpretation of the word, Indian "folklore" has been made to include some tales translated directly from literary texts. Those who have so offended are for the most part natives of the country. Pandit S. M. Natesa Sastri, for example, offers forty-five stories in his collection. One of these, which appears as No. 13 in Tales of the Sun, is in reality no oral tale but a translation of the Alakesakatha, a sixteenth century Tamil romance published by him in two other places as a piece of literature. Other of his tales are evidently literary, as for instance No. 3, "The Soothsayer"s Son." How many more are of this character I cannot say. The same remark applies to some of the stories found in Mr. G. B. Subramiah Pantalu"s Folklore of the Telugus, of which, for instance, No. 41 is a translation of the entire first book of the Hitopadesa in some Telugu version.
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