Description

This book contains folk stories that are an inseparable part of fourteen fasts and festivals celebrated by Kanyakubja Brahman women in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh. The chapters of the book correspond to the festivals’ and are organized chronologically, according to the Hindu festival cycle; an outline of the
customs associated with each festival is followed by the stories told during that festival. Photographs of paintings or sculptures typically made during a festival are given where appropriate.
The fourteen festivals discussed in this book represent only a small number of the fasts and festivals observed by the families of this region. In selecting the festivals for this study, I chose those
which are performed solely or mainly by women, and those in which stories and paintings are important.India is a land of stories. Some basic religious and mythological stories have been told repeatedly for millennia. Many legends of the ancient Vedic texts reappear, with elaboration, in the Epics and Puranas. Didactic and parabolic fables and stories of the Pañcatantr-Jātak type appear first in the original text of the Pañcatantr,
composed in Kashmir about 200 B.C. (Ryder 1956: 3-4). Elaborations on the Jätak tales appear in Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Dammapad and the Avadān, as well as in Jain literature.
Later, more secular stories appear in numerous renditions of the Brhat-kathā (including the Kathāsaritsāgar, Brhatkathāmañjari,and Brhatkathācloksañgrah) and various versions of the Vetala-
pancavincati, Vikramacharit, and Cuksaptali (Elwin 1944: x).Old Deccan Days, a collection of stories orally current among the people of India, was published in 1868 (Frere); since then, an ever increasing number of Indian folktales have been printed in and outside India. A Bibliography of South Asian Folklore
(Kirkland 1966) includes 6,852 books and articles.