Bringing together nearly one hundred tales translated from fourteen languages, Folktales of India opens the vast narrative world of Indian folklore to readers of English. Beck includes oral tales collected from tribal areas, peasant groups, urban areas, and remote villages in north and south India, and the distinctive boundary regions of Kashmir, Assam, and Manipur. The tales in this collection emphasize universal human characteristics--truthfulness, modesty, loyalty, courage, generosity, and honesty. Each story is meant to be savored individually with special attention given to the great range of motifs presented and the many distinct narrative styles used. Folktales of India offers a superb anthology of India's bountiful narrative tradition. "This collection does an excellent job of representing India. . . . It is the type of book that can be enjoyed by all readers who love a well-told tale as well as by scholars of traditional narrative and scholars of India in general."--Hugh M. Flick, Jr., Asian Folklore Studies "The stories collected here are representative, rich in structural subtlety, and endowed with fresh earthy humor."--Kunal Chakraborti, Contributions to Indian Sociology

ttipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan (1929-1993) was a scholar of Indian literature who wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan wore many hats as a scholar and author, those of a philologist, folklorist, translator, poet and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and English. He published works on both classical and modern variants of these literatures and also argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due.

He was born into an Iyengar family in Mysore City in 1929. He was educated in English at the Mysore University and at Indiana University. In 1962, he joined the University of Chicago and later taught there in several departments. In 1983, he was appointed the William E. Colvin Professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, of Linguistics, and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and, the same year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

As an Indo American writer Ramanujan had the experience of the native milieu as well as of the foreign milieu. His poems like the "Conventions of Despair" reflected his views on the cultures and conventions of the east and the west.

A. K. Ramanujan died in 1993 as result of adverse reaction to anesthesia during preparation for surgery.