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In Quest of Indian Folktales: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke.

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In Quest of Indian Folktales: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke. By Sadhana Naithani. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xi + 328 pp.

"In 1996, I located the handwritten manuscripts of William Crooke's famed collection of the folktales of northern India in the archive of the Folklore Society, London" (vii). So begins the preface to Sadhana Naithani's recent study and tale collection, In Quest of Indian Folktales: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke. Forty years ago, and in a very different cultural moment, Richard Dorson opened his preface to the seminal folkloric study, The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge, 1968), in strikingly similar terms. "This book began a long time ago," Dorson wrote, "in the summer of 1948, when on a casual visit to my sister who lived in London I stumbled across the library of The FolkLore Society" (v). Whether it is intentional or not, Naithani's prefatory echo of her prestigious forerunner is revealing, both because it indicates the extent to which these two studies are working in the same tradition, and because it reminds us, simultaneously, how far folklore studies has traveled in the intervening years. On the one hand, this echo draws our attention...

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