Book Review:"Folk Tales from India" by A.K. Ramanujan

 Book Review:"Folk Tales from 

India" by A.K. Ramanujan


This book is a collection of 110 folk stories translated from 22 Indian languages by A.K.Ramanujan.The compilation and translation of stories really amazed me.The book and it's stories did not bore me at all due to the unique and different plots it contained.

Since the time I was a young boy,I loved to genre of short stories, one was fairy tales for their adventurous tales filled with fantasy and the other was folk tales due to the unique and creative writing of such tales....Over the years,I had stopped reading such tales and shifted to novels but this book just brought me back to those days!

The stories are a good mix of humour, moral and adventure.In this book, we can see different writing styles from Kashmiri to Tamil and from Gujarati to Assamese.

My favourite Tales were:
The Brahmin who swallowed a god(Bengali)- Story of a Brahmin who swallowed a god who was troubling him.
•The Ogress Queen(Kashmiri)-Story of a Ogress who becomes the wife of the king
•Winning a princess(Tulu)-Story of Princess Kamasandage's wait for a suitable husband
•Prince Sabar(Gujerati)-Story of the ups and downs in the life of a princess who is thrown out for defying her father
•Gandharva Sen is dead(Bengali)-A funny tale of people crying over an unnecessary matter.
•Adventures of a disobedient son (Kannada)-Tale of the adventures of a prince who is thrown out of his kingdom.
--------and many more!--------

The book was so splendid that I finished it within 3 days!I recommend this book to anybody who wants to take a break from long novels and enjoy short and beautiful tales from every corner of India!!!

-Milind S Suvarna
 Class 10

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