Indian Folk-Epics and Other Folklore

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I am extremely happy to put forward the proceedings of the 39thSession (Conference) of Indian Folklore Congress(IFC) held at Postgraduate Department of Gujarati (Folk and Indigenous Studies), N. S. Patel Arts College, Anand (Gujarat) on October 9-11, 2015. This volume is a collection of total sixteenth research papers presented by the scholars from across India. There is a dearth of qualitative references on the study of the folk epics in the Indian context. Except The Epic Oral and Written (CIIL: Mysore, 1998) edited by Lauri Honko, Jawaharlal Handoo and John Miles Foley, perhaps there is no text that can be theoretically beneficial to the Indian researchers. I personally felt that there was a need of an up-to-date reference on Indian folk-epics. I thought that by organising a conference or a scholarly dialogue on the topic a corpus on the study of Indian folk-epics could be formed. Hence, I requested my friend, Prof. Jawaharlal Handoo, the President of IFC, to organise the 39th session of IFC at N. S. Patel Arts College, Anand. Prof. Handoo accepted our proposal and thus obliged our Institution. I grab this opportunity to thank Dr. Mohan Patel, the Principal of N. S. Patel Arts College and Dr. Prashant Patel, the Head, Postgraduate Department of Gujarati (Folk and Indigenous Studies) for their financial] support and warm hospitality.

The main theme of the conference was "Folk-Epics of India". It also focused on the sub-themes like the path makers of Indian folklore study, folklore and traditional knowledge, folklore and world view, folklore and ethnic identity, and folklore and regional concerns. Out of total thirty two research papers presented in this conference, we found these sixteenth papers illuminating (of course others were also good but could not be included in this volume due to certain reasons).

The first paper, "Folklore, Public Sphere and Civil Society: The Case of the Marginalised" was in fact a key-note address delivered by Prof. Jawaharlal Handoo. In his keynote address Prof. Handoo shows the limitation of verbative material-based old ways of studying folklore. The true and innovative folklore study must base itself on folk-culture and public sphere. He has stressed that the verbative narrative songs and others lore is the voice of the people for change and better condition has not been so well received and studied.

This limitation of our folklore study is rooted in our traditional paradigms that gave more importance to lore than folk. It is the main limitation of our folk-lore study that we focus more on the text rather than context. He also notes that Jhaverchand Meghani was not only a collector of folklore but also an excellent fieldworker, a folk singer and a good analyser of folklore and oral discourse. He had a perfect understanding of public sphere and the civil society. Prof. Handoo has also discussed other aspects of folklore, oral discourse in the context of marginalization and public spare.

**Contents and Sample Pages**