Includes an overview of Indian telling; the basics of storytelling; stories from all the states and tips on how to tell; over 50 activities covering visual art, writing, craft and discussion; interesting and replicable black and white illustrations based on folk styles; unique story map; ways to find other stories to tell; discussion on storytelling in schools; and further resources, story sources and reading.

Spanning from Sumer to the present day few literary genres show greater continuity throughout their history than the fable. Historical evidence reaching as far back as Antiquity, supports the study of more than 500 works considered to be fables. This translation of the original Spanish, standard work on the fable, traces the history of the Graeco-Latin fable, investigates its origins, reconstructs lost collections from the Hellenistic Age, and establishes relationships between the fablist of the Imperial Age and the study of Medieval, Greek and Latin fables. Supplements at the end of each chapter have been added, giving information on a new bibliography and some new data, together with references to subsequent studies.

This book coins the term ‘imperial beast fable’ to explore modern forms of human-animal relationships and their origins in the British Empire. Taking as a starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, it examines literary reworkings of these fables, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, in relation to the global politics of race, language, and species. The imperial beast fable figures variably as a key site where the nature and origins of mankind are hotly debated; an emerging space of conservation in which humans enclose animals to manage and control them; a cage in which an animal narrator talks to change its human jailors; and a vision of animal cosmopolitanism, in which a close kinship between humans and other animals is dreamt of. Written at the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial studies, this book proposes that the beast fable embodies the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while also covertly critiquing them. It therefore finds in the beast fable the possibility that the multitudinous animals it gives voice to might challenge the imperial networks which threaten their existence, both in the nineteenth century and today.

Educational resource for teachers, parents and kids!