Folk-lore of the Telugus/Introduction
INTRODUCTION.
It is within every person's experience to enjoy with all attention the tales told by his grand old dames, to climb their knees, to share the envied kiss. There is hardly anybody, I think, who does not look back with fond attachment to those home associations,, with those innocent sweet simple pleasures, whence first we started into life's long race.. We feel them, while the wings of fancy still are free, even in age and at our latest day.. While the unthinking mind is satisfied with these grandmothers' tales as such, the thinking mind goes a step further and endeavours to gather knowledge from these tales of childhood. There are a good many to whom familiarity breeds contempt, and who, in blissful ignorance, scoff at folklore. But the ethnologist cannot fail to regard it as a sine qua non of the study of the racial development. There are many in whom grandeur hears with a disdainful smile these short and simple annals of the poor. But it ought not to be forgotten that these cottages of the poor turn out to be the very nurseries of the wisdom and knowledge which the world has accumulated.
Bare facts of history are not sufficient for the serious ethnologist. There are limits to the historian's survey of the world. "Thus far shalt thou go and no further" can be applied to history as to other departments of knowledge as well. When, therefore, history tries to disdain the limits of its little reign, it calls in the assistance of folklore," archaeology, phrenology, etc., etc. Though folklore appears to be a very much neglected branch of science, it takes the place of history during the times when there are no records, by throwing a world of light on the manners, customs and religious and social condition of the people whose folklore it is. We all know that every good is not without alloy, and that this visible Nature and this common world is so created that the two things—evil and good—co-exist. We cannot get any knowledge in a concentrated form. If this be something like a universal law of our present condition, if knowledge, for example, cannot be obtained except by hard and often painful application, if health can be secured only by those who are content to pay the price of steady exercise and strict temperance for it, we need not be surprised if the folklorean study is by no means a purely easy affair, one that can be learnt at first sight. Indian folklore presents very often a thick net-work of the natural and the supernatural which exerts a peculiar talismanic influence on the listener. This blending of the natural and the supernatural has taken possession of the Telugu mind to a very great extent, so much so that the ordinary Telugu person fully believes that there can be no gloomier form of infidelity than that which questions the moral attributes of that Great Being in Whose hands lie the final destinies of us all. His ideas of God's dealings with man are so peculiar to himself that none but those intimately acquiainted with him can rightly understand them.