Reviewed By: Gary Werchan

Kashmiri Folktales

http://www.koausa.org/Folk/index.html

This site is part of a larger site run by an organization called the Kashmiri Overseas Association, which according to the site, seeks to preserve and make known the cultural contributions of the Kashmiri people, and their current plight. The folktale portion of the site contains over 35 stories, with the majority of them from a group collected by S. L. Sadhu. Based on other web searches, Sadhu’s work appears to be the sort of definitive collection of Kashmiri folktales (at least on the web) as it is incorporated into dozens of lists of Kashmiri reference sources. I found the stories to have some higher level of subtlety and complexity in the lessons and morals being transferred. Perhaps they are not strange to a native of the Indian subcontinent, but for me many were completely different moral lessons than we usually encounter in Western tales. For example, in The Burglar’s Gift, a burglar hires a mason, and teaches him a lesson about protecting his belongings, giving him a ruthless lashing at the same time so the lesson will stick with the mason forever. Although there certainly are versions of tales we encounter in European-based collections, what makes this collection fun are the stories that have a unique flavor of the Indian sub-continent. The stories are made very accessible by the fact that the writer provides a paragraph or two explanation or stage-setting for each one. For example, Sadhu provides a useful background on the concept of a “professional wedding guest” in historical India, without which his story of the same name would be difficult to appreciate for its subtleties of behavior. Another excellent feature is a glossary accompanying the Sadhu stories which explains many of the non-English terms used in the tales. A delightful added feature of this site is in the inclusion of Real Audio files in the story Mahadev Bishta : A Clever Thief. With these audio files we get to hear the story told in Kashmiri, and a phonetic transcription is also provided. The entire Kashmiri Overseas Association (KOA) website, and the folktales section particularly, is attractively designed and easily navigated. There is simple, but elegant, line art accompanying Sadhu’s stories. The pages load quickly and are generally free of typos and other errors. Naturally the KOA has some political messages in its site relating to what they perceive as an ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus by the Muslim majority. However, there are no signs or overtones of these issues in the folktales section and it comes across purely as a celebration of the Kashmiri culture. I feel that the site should be assessed as being accurate in so far as the originators of the site appear to be native Kashmiris who have collected what they know to be genuine folktales representative of their province. The web site provides a direct e-mail contact for the webmaster, although not to any of the authors or their representatives.