Frank J. Korom’s South Asian Folklore: A Handbook is an introduction for the uninitiated reader to South Asian folkloric forms and their academic study. Korom is a senior scholar in South Asian folklore studies and aware of the difficulties in compiling a survey of South Asian folklore as well as the significance of studying the forms. Emphasizing the complex diversity of the region, he follows throughout a method of employing selected examples to illustrate broader trends and generalizations. The introduction includes a brief cultural and linguistic sketch of the region followed by a discussion of the field of folklore studies, its import in the study of South Asia, and the predicaments and prospects in the field of South Asian folklore studies. The remainder of the book, structured similarly to earlier Greenwood folklore handbooks, divides the discussion of South Asian folklore into four sections: definitions and classification, examples and texts, scholarships and approaches, and contexts.

Discussions on the history of folklore studies in the region--the definitions and the scholarship sections--present information complementary to one another. In the former, Korom uses the specific case of Bengal to analyze processes of British colonialism and Indian nationalism in India (1800-1947) in relation to their interactions with regional folklore. These interactions resulted in the deployment of folklore for political purposes, increase in academic interest, and the development of indigenous taxonomies. Complementing this broad history, the latter section details academic work on South Asian folklore, reflections of disciplinary trends on this work, and the ways in which the case of South Asia influenced general theories of folklore. Beginning with early European interest and mid-twentieth century work on tale types and motifs, Korom moves on to more recent work in performance studies, to finally look at theoretical tools with the potential to explain the relevance of folklore in a global context: hybridity, transnationalism, intellectual property, etc.

The stuff of the discipline delineated in the above sections is illustrated in the examples section. Selected examples and texts range from tales from the classical Rig Veda, Panchatantra, and Jataka, to local legends, folksongs, proverbs, and riddles, to recent genres such as campus lore and English bilingual jokes. The author does not explicitly describe his criteria for selecting specific examples; however, he has tried to represent diverse geographic sub-regions (parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), languages, contexts, and genres. Selected from prior compilations or drawn from the author’s fieldwork, they are accompanied by short commentaries about what they illustrate. While longer narratives are understandably presented only as English translations, publishing the original text of shorter examples such as poems, riddles, and jumbles, along with their translations, would certainly have benefited readers. Another feature that is conspicuously missing here (in fact, from the book as a whole) is a geographical map to visually illustrate the cultural diversity of the region as well as regional affiliations and movement of folkloric forms.

The last section begins with key classical literary contexts that provide narrative material to oral (and other) folklore. The second half of this section fulfills a number of purposes, weaving theoretical discussions with specific examples of folklore in context. To some extent, it makes up for the compartmentalized structure of the book that, while it makes the material accessible to students, limits associations between the sections. This section reiterates present-day concerns of the discipline of folklore studies: the importance of contexts--performative and political--and a caution against rigid taxonomies. Consciously diverging from Redfield’s and Singer’s model of great and little traditions, it stresses again A. K. Ramanujan’s interactive model that "recognizes the constant back-and-forth traffic between academic categories that have little relevance to everyday lived reality" (14). The richly referenced book ends with an annotated list of web resources.

On the whole, the book is a useful initiation into South Asian folklore for students of South Asia as well as of folklore, and conveys the richness and diversity of the subject in the limited space available. In parts, it also addresses the broader aim expressed in the introduction: to interest advanced scholars from Euro-America and South Asia in a dialogue, bridging theoretical and comparative concerns of the former with the latter’s concerns of collection and preservation.

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[Review length: 692 words • Review posted on June 28, 2007]