In Quest of Indian Folktales: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book review

In Quest of Indian Folktales: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke. By SADHANA NAITHANI. Bloomington: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006. Pp. xi + 329.$65.

Few modern researchers, if any, have done so much consistently, astutely, sensitively, soberly, elegantly, and illuminatingly to bring out of the shadows an important, yet ignored, colonial-time Indian scholar than Sadhana Naithani has done with Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube (late 1850s-1914). Pandit Chaube was a full, though insufficiently acknowledged, partner of British colonial civil servant William Crooke (1848-1923) in a purposeful quest to collect Indian folktales and to make them known to a British, and eventually international and scholarly, readership. Their day-to-day collaboration lasted only five years, from 1891/2 to 1896, when Chaube, born in a scholarly family of Gorakhpur District (in what is now eastern Uttar Pradesh) and a graduate of Calcutta's Presidency College, became personal "pandit to" ethnographer and folklorist Crooke. They worked from Mirzapur where Crooke was Collector, a town that also was the principal location from which, a century earlier, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, who held the more prestigious position of Judge and Magistrate, and his Indian acolytes assembled the largest part of the vast collection that, together with that acquired by Colin Mackenzie in South India, later became a primary foundation for the Sanskrit manuscript holdings of the India Office Library. Like Chaube, Crooke has received less recognition than he deserves, failing to this date to become the subject of a notice in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, even though he continued a vigorous scholarly program and received a number of honors after his retirement in Britain. George A. Grierson, for whose Linguistic Survey of India Chaube went to work after Crooke's departure, gained greater fame and a knighthood, yet, Chaube insisted in later years, "Whenever I write an article for any periodical like Journal Asiatic Society, Bengal, Journal Asiatic Society. Bombay etc. I always subscribe myself as Late Pandit to William Crooke Esq. I.C.S." (p. 18).

Naithani's works will go a long way to remedy the ill-deserved obscurity in which the pair has fallen. In 2002 she published a first collection of the folktales issued from their collaboration. Her Folktales from Northern India: William Crooke and Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube offered 252 tales that originally appeared from 1892 to 1896 in...