Rights: World
There is a rich variety of tales and an amalgamation of many threads of a major stream of South India’s oral tradition in the book Hundred Tamil Folk and Tribal Tales. The tales, crafted together in Sujatha Vijayaraghavan’s lucid English translation, beacon a serious engagement in Indic studies.Vijayaraghavan’s volume provides an easy access to the cultural registers and linguistic mores of a tribal/folk population at a crucial juncture of colonial modernity.
Furthermore, she translates not merely the tales as she finds them in the Tamil original, naatupura kathai kalanjiyam, but distinguishes and recognises the tribal tale, otherwise unnoticed in the proverbial ocean of Indian folktales. As a distinct and stimulating vein of wisdom and wit in Dravidian lives and popular traditions, the tribal-tale receives the first-ever straight look in the pages.
Sujatha Vijayaraghavan is Professor of English at Pondicherry University, Puducherry. Her teaching and research interests include Indian Writing in English, Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies and Folklore Studies and Oral Literatures. An avid translator she has translated contemporary Tamil fiction and classical Tamil Poetry.
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