“Types of Indic Oral Tales: India, Pakistan, and Ceylon”

The authors have analysed a corpus of oral Indian narrative material containing practically all the collections published in European languages and a selection of oral tales available only in native languages. They apply the familiar taxonomy of the Types of the Folktale by Aarne and Thompson. The work supplements the earlier motif index by Thompson and Balys, The Oral Tales of India (1958), which covered “essentially the same material as the present work but index it in a different way.” This time the criterion of several versions is crucial for the identification of a tale type.