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About The Book : This volume contains a collection of twenty-four traditional stories from the southern Indian state of Maharashtra. Mary Eliza Isabella Frere (1845-1911) travelled to India in 1863 to stay with her father, Sir Bartle Frere, the Governor of Bombay. She became fascinated with Indian culture and transcribed these stories from her ayah (nanny and chaperone) Anna Liberata da Souza who had been told them by her grandmother. Expressive and detailed, these stories formed part of southern India's traditional oral culture, at risk of being lost. This volume includes an introduction by Sir Bartle Frere exploring the cultural background to the stories and a chapter by Anna Liberata da Souza describing her life and childhood. This volume was extremely popular, being reprinted in four editions by 1889 and encouraging the study of comparative mythology while revealing new information concerning Indian traditional culture. A long-lost collection of Indian fairy tales transcribed by the daughter of the British governor of Bombay. In the cold months of 1865, young Mary Frere and her father, Bartle Frere, British governor of Bombay, set out in a caravan across the Deccan province of south central India. During their journey Mary transcribed 24 popular Hindu folktales told to her by her nursemaid. That collection of tales, which she published as Old Deccan Days, not only became the first Indian folklore collection in English, it established a new genre of writing about British India. About The Author : Mary Eliza Isabella Frere (1845–1911) (nickname May) was an English author of works regarding India. In 1868 Frere published the first English-language field-collected book of Indian storytales, Old Deccan Days. Frere was born at the rectory of Bitton in Gloucestershire, England on 11 August 1845.Nicknamed May, she was the eldest of five children (the others being Catherine, Georgina, Eliza and Bartle) of Henry Bartle Frere and his wife Catherine (died 1899) who was the daughter of Lieutenant-General Sir George Arthur, 1st Baronet. Mary's father had served in the colonial administration of Bombay since 1834, and in 1862 he was appointed Governor of Bombay. The family lived in the Parish of St Mary, Wimbledon, where Mary was privately educated. Frere published several poems and a play. Her most popular work was Old Deccan Days; or, Hindoo Fairy Legends, Current in Southern India.