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or literary use as the source-material poses complex problems : it considerably disturbs and blurs the significant categorization into the oral folk tradition and the literate. Please permit me to clearify this point a bit. During the earlier period, due to the dominance of ethnocentric or Eurocentric attitude, the traditional non-Western cultures were pushed to the area of anthropology (to counteract which fortunately a rapidly growing tendeney has gathered momentum in recent times). One of the fall-outs was the blurring or confusion regarding the perception of the borderlands between the traditional Indian oral songs and narratives primarily secular, and those of the Santa-bhaktas (preserved through oral as well as written transmission), which were traditionally assigned to definite authorship or were anonymous. In the Indian situation this has got an unbroken continuity from the medieval to the modern period. But the stituation becomes complicated when we have on one hand folk-tale texts that have been recorded without any modification, and on the other their modern retellings, versions or use as plots for newly composed fictions and songs. The latter harbour a modern view of life and culture. They connot be passed as recent folk-versions. The purpose, class of audience and the socio-cultural parameters are considerably different in the two cases.
It appears to me that much more attention
