There are few people who have not been subjected to the command, "Tell me a story," and those who, on such occasions, find pleasure in trying to make children happy, rack their brains to find something new to tell. They desire that their story should contain nothing but thoughts full of good-will and encouragement to follow good examples. In the telling of the story it is natural to picture the details of the scene according to the story-teller's own experience. Such is the incentive from which the folk-tale is born.
To those of us who come from the West, it comes as a pleasing surprise to find in the folktales of India scenes and incidents which are familiar to us from our early reading of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Anderson's Fairy Tales. This similarity early attracted the attention of scholars and there have been controversies as to the original sources of tales common to East and West: Sir William Jones and the early Sanskrit scholars who worked with him, found two collections of these tales so complete as to leave no further doubt that the origin was, as had been surmised, in the East. This discovery made it clear that those tales, with which we are all so familiar, had their origin not later than the early days of the Christian era: and there were many who saw in the incidents and the teaching of the tales the influence of the life and teaching of the Lord Buddha and his disciples. For long it was supposed, therefore, that the tales had had their origin in the ancient kingdom of Magadha and that they might have been composed by the followers of the Lord Buddha himself. More recently, however, the Jataka collection of the Buddhist stories was discovered and amongst the carvings on the railings round the Bharhut stupa scenes from these stories were recognised. As the carving dates from 250 to 200 B.C., the origin of the tales is now believed to be not later than the time when Buddha lived about the 5th century, B.C., and it is recognised that the features which seemed to prove a Buddhist origin are really alterations made to suit the Buddhist doctrine. It is not likely that materials will come to light to enable us to trace the origin still further back, but who can say when these tales were first conceived?
The attempts to trace the source of the tales have brought to light hidden knowledge. The history of the Indian people in these ancient days is but imperfectly known, but the tales are a mirror of the customs and the thoughts of the people and, as such, are of far greater value to us than the dates and the names of a few individuals the dry hones of history. It needs but a glance at the pictures of the Bharhut carvings in the book of Jataka stories edited by Francis and Thomas to enable us to picture the life of the people in those times and from these little carvings, we can create a mental picture of the incidents in the other tales; and the picture is so very like the scenes we see every day. Human nature changes little, and the primitive emotions are depicted on men's faces now as they were then.
In India there has been little change in the environment of village life for thousands of years and often little change in the fashion of the simple dress of the villager. In the West, on the other hand, the environment of to-day is so different from that of ages gone by that our pictures of folk tales have often grotesque appearance almost entirely absent in India. The monkey, the elephant, the fighting ram of the Bharhut carvings have in no way changed, and their environment is the same.
My first course of lectures as Ramtanu Lahiri Research Fellow of the Calcutta University in the history of Bengali Language and Literature, delivered in 1914, was published under the title of Chaitanya and his Companions in 1917. The present volume contains my Fellowship lectures delivered in 1917. From 1914 to 1919, I delivered six courses of such lectures; each course, complete in 12 lectures, forms a volume of the size of this book. As most of these lectures have not yet been published and as there is no certainty about the time of their publication, I owe it to the public to refresh their memory about what they heard long ago, by mentioning the subjects treated in them.
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