Project Gutenberg's Deccan Nursery Tales, by Charles Augustus Kincaid

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Title: Deccan Nursery Tales
or, Fairy Tales from the South

Author: Charles Augustus Kincaid

Illustrator: M. V. Dhurandhar

Release Date: December 21, 2009 [EBook #11167]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DECCAN NURSERY TALES ***

Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Distributed
Proofreaders Team from scans of the Million Books Project.

Deccan Nursery Tales
or
Fairy Tales from the South

by

C.A. Kincaid, C.V.O.

1914.

To my little son

Dennis

Whose interest in these stories
first induced me to offer them to the public
this little volume is affectionately inscribed

PREFACE

These stories first appeared in the Times of India newspaper, and my
acknowledgments are due to the editor for his courtesy in permitting
their publication.

I have translated all of them as literally as possible from the
original Marathi. But, owing to the difference between Marathi and
English canons of taste, I have had in a very few places slightly
to change the sense. In some places, owing to the obscurity of the
original text, I have had to amplify the translation. In other places
I have had to cut short the descriptions of Hindu rites and ceremonies
so as to avoid wearying the English reader.

It may not be out of place to say just a word about the Indian gods
mentioned in the stories. It must be remembered that the main Hindu
gods are three in number. They are all sprung from a common origin,
Brahma, but they are quite separate beings. They do not form a trinity,
i.e. three in one or one in three. And each of them has a wife and a
family. The following genealogical tree will, I hope, help the reader.

Brahma
Shiva = Parwati
Ganpati
= the daughters of Agni
Kartakswami [1]
Vishnu = Mahalaxmi