No longer is it a truth universally acknowledged that all fairy tales are of Indic origin. The area now collectively known as South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and in this context Tibet) has undoubtedly transmitted many tales to neighbouring regions, but it has also received, preserved and transformed others. The task of determining the direction of transmission is at best demanding and painstaking, and at worst arid, subjective or even impossible; a more rewarding line of enquiry is to investigate what changes are made when a given tale, story unit or motif is transmitted from one culture to another, in whichever direction. A third category - those tales which have not, or not yet, been reported outside the area - deserves much more study than it has so far received. Do any of these tales have distinctive features which betray their South Asian origin, or couldthey theoretically have been composed elsewhere? An essay of this length cannot hope to deal comprehensively with every question; I shall therefore concentrate firstly on a few representative tales, and secondly on patterns of research, past and future, perforce leaving aside vast areas and numerous major authorities.

Use of terminology devised to be appropriate to Europe complicates any enquiry into South Asian tales. In the Indic context, ‘oral’ cannot be equated with ‘folk’, nor ‘written’ with ‘literary’. Texts which, by European standards, are clearly ‘literary’, ‘religious’ or even ‘philosophical’ in nature have been transmitted without the aid of writing, or alongside written versions, and also alongside texts which can be defined as ‘folktales’, and the degree of cross-fertilisation should not be underestimated or disregarded. Whatever may be the case elsewhere, the major Indic literary creations contain a considerable amount of so-called ‘folk material’ and, more importantly, are themselves the source of a great many folk narratives. The problem is to decide which is which.

Nor should South Asia be regarded as in any sense homogeneous. Only from the outside has the area ever been seen as a unit.