Santal Folk Tales

Tales of the Santal people of Bengal set down by a missionary who spoke their language: the jackal and the crocodile, the boy who married a bonga, the origin of the tribes. A. Campbell collected them in the 1890s and printed them with the tellers' asides intact. They are among the earliest Indian tribal folklore recorded from the speakers rather than from Sanskrit sources. Fifty-nine plates, from Rubens to Gustave Moreau, gather the myths and allegories that shaped Europe's own storytelling tradition, a fitting counterpart to tales carried straight from Santal voices.