Tales and Legends From India |
Ruskin Bond |
Rupa (2015) |
|
Rating: | **** |
Tags: | Fiction, India, Short Stories, Legends, Folklore |
Fictionttt Indiattt Short Storiesttt Legendsttt Folklorettt |
Here are tales from different parts of the country, from followers of different faiths; stories of kings and commoners, tribal people and townsmen. Included in this collection are stories, painstakingly culled and thoughtfully crafted, from the Mahabharata (Shivas Anger and Shakuntala); the Jataka (The Hare in the Moon and The Crane and the Crab) and from regional folklore (The Tiger-Kings Gift and The Happy Herdsman).
With detailed annotations on the sources of each of these stories, Tales and Legends from India showcases the unique and wonderful ethos of India, as told by its most beloved storyteller, Ruskin Bond.
About the Author
Ruskin Bond has been writing for over sixty years, and now has over 120 titles in print-novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, anthologies and books for children.
His first novel, The Room on the Roof, received the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957.
He has also received the Padma Shri (1999), the Padma Bhushan (2014) and two awards from Sahitya Akademi-one for his short stories and another for his writings for children. In 2012, the Delhi government gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award. Born in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Shimla, New Delhi and Dehradun.
Apart from three years in the UK, he has spent all his life in India, and now lives in Mussoorie with his adopted family.
Goodreads
RUSKIN BONDS first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far), essays, poems and childrens books. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 for Our Trees StillGrow in Dehra, a collection of short stories, and the Padma Shri in 1999.
Tales and Legends
from India
RUSKIN BOND
Illustrated by Sally Scott
This book is
gifted to book-lovers by
Rddler & Cadzbuddy
Tales and Legends from India
RUSKIN BOND
Illustrated by Sally Scott
Re-designed by Rah
Published by
Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 1990
7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj
New Delhi 110002
Copyright Ruskin Bond 1982, 1990
ePUB recreated by Rddler & Cadzbuddy
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-81-291-1919-3
Twenty-fifth impression 2015
30 2928 27 2625
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publishers prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
This book is
gifted to book-lovers by
Rddler & Cadzbuddy
For Rakesh, Mukesh and Savitri
Contents
Introduction
SHEHERAZADE, whose life depended upon her ability to turn out one tale after another, night after Arabian night, would, I am sure, have approved of my devoting most of my life to story-telling. Although in no danger of being executed for failing to meet a deadline (could that be how the word came into being?), my life has in many ways depended upon my story-telling abilities, which have been the best and only way in which I have been able to make a livingand also choose the place of my abode, the foothills of the Himalayas.
For over twenty-five years, ever since I was a boy out of school in Simla, I have been a professional teller of tales short stories, tall stories, folk-stories, true stories, unfinished stories. I am still a long way from Sheherazades thousand and one tales, but then, I havent had the executioners axe poised over me, spurring me on: only the rent to pay and books to buy and an occasional chicken for my supper, prepared by Prem Singh, who cooks chickens better than I write stories. Prem and his family live with me, and it is his children, and their demands for stories, that keep me inventing new tales or digging up old ones such as those in this collection.
My early stories, written when I was in my twenties, were about my own childhood in India and some of the people I knew as I grew up. Then, in my thirties, I wrote about other Indian children some of them are in The Road to the Bazaar, also published by Julia MacRae. Now in my forties, I find myself going even further back in time, to the young heroes and heroines, Gods and Demons, of myth, legend and folklore. Although my father was British, I grew up an Indian, and have always cherished the literature of both East and West. There has been no division of loyalties; only a double inheritance.
Some of the responsibility for my interest in folklore must lie (literally) at the door of the mother of my friend Anil Singh, whose ancestral home is in a village not far from Agra. Long before I came to dwell in the Himalayan country (to use a phrase from The Jataka), I spent a winter in my friends village in the plains, where I soon discovered that his mother had at her command a great store of folklore, and there was nothing she liked better than to tell me stories in the evening gloam at cow-dust time, that brief Indian twilight before she went indoors to prepare our dinner. She would recline on a string cot in the courtyard, puffing at a hookah, recounting old tales of ghosts, fairies and other familiars. Two or three of these tales appear in this collection. There were more; but room had to be made for a wider selection tales representative of different parts of the country, of followers of different faiths, of tribal peoples, kings and commoners. I have leant heavily on the great Hindu religious epic, The Mahabharata, in which so many enchanting stories are found; on the Buddhist fables in The Jataka; and on the early renderings of pioneering folklorists, Indian and British. In a section of Notes, which I have compiled with as much care as I have retold the stories, I have given the sources and the background to the tales and legends.
I am fortunate to be living and working in the mountains, in full view of the majestic snow-peaks of the furthest Himalayan ranges those same peaks where the gods and goddesses of Hindu mythology have their abode.
And I am doubly fortunate in being able to look down from the mountains upon the plains of India, a melting-pot of races and religions, where so much has happened, and still happens, to excite the mind and spirit. India is more than a land it is an atmosphere and this book is designed to give the reader the feel of India and recapture some of its old magic.