Current Trends in Folklore (An Old and Rare Book)

About the Book Jawaharlal Handoo (b. July 1, 1941), is a Folklore Expert at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, where he has been manning the Folklore Unit since 1970. He has also been teaching theoretical folklore at the University of Mysore as a visiting member of its faculty since 1974. Dr. Handoo received his M.A. in literature from Jammu and Kashmir University, and Ph.D. in folklore from Kurukshetra University. He is the founder-secretary of Folklore Fellows of India and editor of its journal and news bulletin. He has written many books in English, Hindi, Kashmiri and Urdu on topics ranging from literature to linguistics and folklore. Some of his books have won prestigious awards. Among his recent books, A Bibliography of Indian Folk Literature (1977) has been applauded as one of the need filling books in the much neglected area of folklore studies. Dr. Handoo has also edited Folklore of Rajasthan and a festehrift volume for Dr. Satyendra. He has contributed to Kannada Encyclopaedia, Punjabi Encyclopaedia and to a large number of professional journals on folklore, linguistics and literature. He also abstracted materials from South Asian journals for the Abstracts of Folklore Studies of the American Folklore Society. Dr. Handoo is especially interested in the theoretical and methodological aspects of folklore an area in which he has shown much interest as evidenced by the present volume.

Current trends in folklore is a collection of analytical essays introducing some methodological and application aspects of current folklore theories, particularly Proppian and Lévi-Straussian. The author tests these theories and models on Indian data and attempts to establish the validity of such models in cross-cultural and cross-generic situations.

He also summarizes the major trends dominating the current folkloristic research and points out directions in which these are moving.

Foreword Folklore is, relatively, a new science. In our country it is still in its infancy and, by and large, an unexplored area of study.

Stith Thompson once said: "The essential of all folklore study is collecting and attempting to understand that which has been collected.” Indian folklore is scattered in several languages which have long histories. It invites all attempts to define and categorize its richness and complexity. For the past few years scholars, native as well as foreign, have done tremendous work in collecting this rich and varied material. But attempts to study and analyse these collected materials are of very recent origin. Since folklore is not recognized as an academic discipline to attain independent status in our universities, very few attempts are made to study folklore seriously. Therefore, the scientific growth of this subject, naturally, did not take place. Contribution of Indian scholars to the theory of folklore is practically nil. Fortunately, attention of our universities and scholars is now being focussed on folklore studies. Publication of Current Trends in Folklore by Dr. Jawaharlal Handoo is an example of this happy development. This, perhaps, is the first serious book in English, ever attempted on the theoretical aspects of folklore by an Indian folklorist and published by an Indian university.

Preface Social sciences have always faced a dilemma of which come first of development of theory; a rationale and purpose by which to guide collection. While it might seem obvious that, in the initial stages, collection of data must take priority, it is, upon further reflection, equally true that the materials of a science are always present in the environment awaiting discovery through a perspective which reveals their significance. Folk lore (the data) and folkloristic (the theoretical science) stand in such a situation in India today. On one hand lies, perhaps, the largest and most important set of living folklore to be found anywhere in the world and on the other, there is only the bare rudiment of methodology and theory to motivate its collection.

This is not to say, though, that folklore and folkloristic has been completely neglected in India. Even a novice to the field of Indian folklore, such as myself, must recognize that there have been pockets of interest in folklore and folkloristic scattered over time and region dating back, perhaps, hundreds of years. However, as was true in Europe and America over the past century and a half, interest in folklore has been motivated primarily by other ends literary, sentimental, religious, nationalistic, political etc.

**Contents and Sample Pages**