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In 1871, when Crooke came to India, the ¤rst collection of Indian folktales in English, Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days, was three years old and selling well in England (Frere 1868). The second half of the nineteenth century was not only when folklore collection in India began, but also when it peaked. Pandit Chaube and William Crooke produced their works only in the century’s last decade, when the collection of folklore by colonial British of¤cers, their wives and daughters, and missionaries had already registered itself as a phenomenon. It is with reference to these that the uniqueness and the contribution of Chaube and Crooke gains meaning. Writing on the history of Indian folklore research has been predominantly chronological. Works on Indian folklore have contained this chronology in prefaces , describing, in varying degrees of detail, the sequence of folklore publications. Theoretical commentary has also been derived from the writings and claims of the British collectors. Theoretical analyses by Dorson (1968), Ramanujan (1993) and Jason (1983) are in the context of nineteenth-century European folkloristics. The difference between the two streams—chronological and theoretical—has been the following: while the former has shown that the collection and publication of Indian folklore became hectic and widespread soon after the ¤rst collection appeared, the latter has shown how these materials attracted the attention of major European folklorists, anthropologists, and orientalists, especially indologists, and also publishers . Both the streams are based on the claims of the collectors themselves and the responses of their European contemporaries. Questions about the role of the oftenmentioned “Indian assistants” have not been posed. In a certain sense, the history of Indian folklore research has remained colonial, even at the end of the twentieth century. It has done so because it has not questioned the colonial perspective and methodology. In this scheme of things the association of Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke and their contribution to the study of Indian folklore and popular religion cannot be placed. We need to read the history of colonial British scholarship on Indian folklore anew, with a special eye on the processes of collection and translation. It is not within the scope of this work to research other collectors, and therefore I present here only some observations derivable from the colonial folklore collections. This will help us to understand William Crooke in relation to other British collectors. I propose the following: Crooke, Chaube, and Colonial Folkloristics, 1868–1914 3 1. that the history of late-nineteenth-century Indian folklore research should be seen in the context of colonial India and the ideological paradigms, political exigencies, and cultural representations generated there; 2. that the major collections of Indian folklore by British men and women should be seen in distinction from each other, thereby placing William Crooke’s folkloristic plan in its own right; 3. that the collections of Indian folklore compiled by British administrators, their family members, and missionaries represent a model of folklore research whose methodology and in®uence remain unidenti¤ed. Bernard S. Cohn, in his seminal essay “Command of Language and Language of Command” (1997, 16–56), divides the period 1780–1830 into three stages in the British study of Indian languages and literatures. The ¤rst, epitomized by William Jones, concentrated on learning the classical languages—Sanskrit and Persian—and their literatures. On the one hand, this study led to the codi¤cation of law for the Indians, and on the other, it made this literature available to English readers. During this period, the British believed that they could gain power by discovering the knowledge system of the ruling Indian elite. The second stage re-®ects the need to learn the “popular” languages. As British military power was called into action more often in the ¤rst half of the nineteenth century and embodied mainly by the Indian sepoy, the British felt it acutely necessary to learn the commonly spoken languages. From this grew the third stage, epitomized by the production of Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms: Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell in 1886—a linguistic code manual intended to aid in commanding Indian troops, workers, and domestic servants. To me HobsonJobson is a document of a new language—that of the British Raj in India and beyond. It was a mixture of English, Indian, South East Asian, African, and other languages of the British Empire. Remarkably, even the phrases “Hobson-Jobson...

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