India, Aug. 24 -- Why do certain stories survive? The ones that endure tend to hold a bit of humour, pathos, the element of surprise and, often, a quick, pithy lesson in what it means to be human. Those that do it best, couch all this in entertaining metaphor. And so a tale about mermaids in Puducherry becomes a parable on the power of the sea. A story about why trees stopped roaming around offers a curt reminder that there is a price to be paid for turning a forest against you. The tales that live on the longest tend to address our deepest desires and greatest fears, our flaws, follies and misdeeds. Working across India, the Centre for Contemporary Folklore (CCF) is now in the process of pulling some of these together, onto a single platform. This isn't easy to do, given the country's vast geographic and linguistic scale. So far, over 18 months, 20 volunteers have gathered 250 stories and uploaded them to the archive's website in English. Ten have been adapted as videos and posted to the Centre's YouTube channel. 28 digital flipbooks and five podcast episodes are also now online. What sparked it all off was a sense of personal urgency, say co-founders Dheeraj Dubey, 31, a filmmaker from Delhi, and Nikhita Singh, 29, a playwright from Mumbai. Dubey, born in Kolha village in Madhya Pradesh, was losing touch with his Bagheli roots. He barely speaks the language anymore, he says. Singh, from Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh, only half-remembers the songs in Bhojpuri and Awadhi that she grew up listening to. "It's not just the risk of loss or the draw of nostalgia," she says. "Folktales also have a wonderful way of sparking critical thinking and leading us to new modes of storytelling." The first task CCF faced, as they set out, was deciding how to define "folktale". Typically, this is any story passed on within a population, by word of mouth. But if they were determined to represent a certain aspect of Indian culture, where would they draw the line? Would they, for instance, include ghost stories and urban legends? "The answer we settled on was that it must be temporal, rooted in a specific place," says Ashmeen Bains, 28, an art curator in Chandigarh and director of editorial strategy at CCF. "We look for little clues that ground a story in local culture: Does it mention a village, a lived ritual or describe a type of architecture, cuisine or textile? What does it have to say about native flora and fauna?" Part of the joy of their search, Bains adds, has come from hearing echoes of a tale in different regions. "As people wandered across the country, they took their stories with them, blending narratives in the most surprising ways," she says. And so, in Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh, solar eclipses are attributed to a dog biting the sun (though the reasons vary). In the Animals section, meanwhile, very different tales feature the crow. To Madhya Pradesh's Dhanwar tribe, it is a benevolent companion, alerting a farmer to impending disasters. In Tamil Nadu, it is a trickster, stealing food from a generous sparrow. In Uttar Pradesh, it stands in for dishonesty, and suffers a bad end. It isn't all metaphor. Sometimes a tale contains plain information, instruction or warning. In Maharashtra's eco-sensitive Kaas Plateau, ancient stories say humans must not enter the forests during certain months. These coincide with a delicately poised pollination season in which meadows fill with flowers. "Folklore has been key to understanding the past," says anthropologist Lopamudra Maitra, author of two books on folktales, The Owl Delivered the Good News All Night Long (2021) and How the World Was Born (2024). In a sense, they represent a body of foundational information about the first things we interrogated, interpreted and understood. Common sense was distilled as folk tales; so were norms, superstitions, history and early ideas. "By treating water bodies as sacred, for example, folktales helped keep rivers pure," Maitra says. "Today, stories like these raise pertinent new questions, such as: What has led to their current state of neglect?"...