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Old Deccan Tales is a collection of folk tales from India’s rich fairyland where rajas, ranis, rakshas, jackals, magicians, and cobras prevail. Children will enjoy the daring, brave, and wonderful creatures and people that populate the stories as they strive to improve their lives or to save themselves, their friends, and their loved ones from trials most deadly. * * * * First published in 1868, this was the first English-language field-collected set of twenty-four traditional stories from the southern Indian state of Maharashtra. The author, Mary Eliza Isabella Frere (1845-1911), travelled to India in 1863 to stay with her father, Sir Bartle Frere, the Governor of Bombay. She became fascinated with Indian culture and transcribed these stories from her ayah (nanny and chaperone) Anna Liberata da Souza, who had been told them by her grandmother. Expressive and detailed, these stories formed part of southern India’s traditional oral culture, at risk at the time of being lost. German orientologist Max Müller (1823-1900) reviewed this collection and wrote that her rendition of Sanskrit originals read like a direct translation of ancient Sanskrit. * * * * This is a copy of the third edition, published in 1881, and has a brief nine-page biography of the narrator, Anna Liberata da Souza, describing her life and childhood. In the third-edition Preface Mary Frere provides more details on the events surrounding her collecting the stories, which is in addition to the information on the stories themselves and the conventions she took in recording them given in the Introduction and the Collector’s Apology. The books was extremely popular, being reprinted in four editions by 1889 and encouraged the study of comparative mythology while revealing new information concerning Indian traditional culture. * * * * Check out the Flying Chipmunk Publishing catalog at www.FlyingChipmunkPublishing.com, or Friend us on Facebook for our latest Children’s, Juvenile, and Adult releases.
