Sixty folk tales from Tulu, a dialect spoken predominantly in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts of the State and Kasaragod district of Kerala, will soon be available for a wider readership with their translations in English ready.
Titled The Rain Boy , its Indian and international editions are set to be released by the Chair in Kannada, Centre for Indian Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in October.
Purushottama Bilimale, who heads the Chair, told The Hindu that the translation project had cost about ₹1 lakh. The work, running to 275 pages, would be a joint publication by the Chair and Manohar Publishers and Distributors. “Such works will enhance the qualification of Tulu for its inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution,” he said.
Translated by B. Surendra Rao, retired professor of History at Mangalore University, and K. Chinnappa Gowda, professor of Kannada at Mangalore University and former Vice-Chancellor of Karnataka Folklore University, the work has been named after one of the more fascinating tales figuring in the collection.
Earlier, three folk tales from Tulu were translated into English in A.K. Ramanujan’s Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages .
“We have chosen folk tales from different regions of Tuḷunadu, and the people from whom the stories were tapped by the fieldworkers belonged to different castes, different age groups and both the sexes. Though largely related to the agrarian world, they also are connected to various vocations,” Mr. Gowda said.
The scholars said the tales selected by them answered to different categories noted by Ramanjuan such as male-centred tales, women-centred tales, tales about families, tales about fate, gods and demons, humorous tales, animal tales, and stories about stories.
“The tales in the volume throw light on various aspects of Tuḷu society. They unveil various kinds of actors, human and non-human, and various situations or predicaments,” Mr. Gowda said.
“The themes of the tales may touch people of all castes, of both the sexes, events here and the imagined events up above or down below, animals and birds, and a whole gamut of human experiences,” Mr. Gowda said.
He said many Tulu folk tales turn pre-conceived notions on their head. “Fox or jackal is known to be crafty because it is a scavenger, feeding on the carrion. However, in our tales there is no single patented image of this animal,” he said.
Mr. Rao and Mr. Gowda also share the credit of translating 114 Tulu poems into English for the first time. The anthology titled Ladle in a Golden Bowl was released in Mangaluru in March.
