Indian Fairy Tales

What It's About

A collection of twenty-nine folk tales gathered from across India and retold in plain English for young readers. Many come from ancient Sanskrit and Pali sources such as the Buddhist Jataka tales, the Panchatantra and the Hitopadesa. Others were taken from nineteenth-century collections of stories told by village storytellers. The cast is a mix of animals and people: jackals, tigers, monkeys and crocodiles alongside Brahmans, princes and kings, and the legendary Punjabi hero Raja Rasalu. Many of the stories end with a moral, and the book is illustrated by John D. Batten.

Key Concepts

Wit triumphs over brute strength, and the weak often outsmart the powerful. Pride, greed and ingratitude are punished, while kindness and loyalty are rewarded. In the stories drawn from Buddhist tradition, the hero is often a past life of the Buddha, so ideas of karma and rebirth run through them. Jacobs also wrote an introduction arguing that India was the original source of many European folk tales. This "Indianist" theory was influential at the time but has since been largely abandoned by folklorists, who now see story-motifs as spreading in many directions. Because he worked from existing English translations and collections, and adapted them for children, the tales are best read as retellings rather than faithful transcriptions.

About the Author

Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916) was an Australian-born British folklorist, literary critic and historian. Born in Sydney, he moved to England as a young man and studied at Cambridge. He became a leading figure in the Folklore Society, and spent his final years in the United States, where he taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.