In this volume Dr. Verrier Elwin has collected and translated 497 folk-songs from Chhattisgarh, that important but little-known country lying in the south-east of the Central Provinces of India. The ‘anthology’ is arranged to show how poetry dignifies and inspires with beauty every aspect of the Indian peasant’s life from the cradle to the grave.

In his comment, Mr. W.G. Archer, I.C.S., the authority on Uraon poetry and Santal law, says that ‘Verrier Elwin is to Indian poetry what Arthur Waley is to Chinese’, for in these poems he has gone far to reveal the Indian sensibility in some of its most truly indigenous and spontaneous forms. He add, Although much love poetry has been written in our time, I do not know of any which expresses a contemporary attitude quite so fully as Verrier Elwin’s translation, and concludes. These translations are a fusion of two sensibilities-the collective sensibility of certain Indian castes and tribes and the alert sensibility of a scholar-poet and it is because of this that they have given something new to contemporary English poetry.