Folklore is having a moment in South Asian writing, and it isn't a nostalgic one. Novelists, poets, memoirists, playwrights, and graphic novelists across the region and its diaspora keep returning to myth, oral narrative, legend, and vernacular ritual, not to decorate their work with the past, but to think through the pressures of the present: ecological collapse, historical trauma, gendered violence, migration, and a digital, algorithmic world the old tales never anticipated and somehow still speak to.

This proposed volume, under contract of interest with Routledge's South Asian Literature in Focus series, takes that convergence seriously, and asks what it means for literary scholarship right now. Folklorists working on South Asia have long insisted that folk narrative in the region cannot be treated as an antiquarian or purely descriptive pursuit; it functions instead as a mode of knowledge production in its own right, bound up with the region's ongoing negotiations of identity, modernity, and power (Korom 2017, 405–7). Read this way, the folk text is already doing intellectual and political work, and the contemporary writer who returns to it is participating in that work rather than simply quoting from it.

This vitality is formal as much as thematic. As A. K. Ramanujan has shown, the same oral tale tends to recur across regions and languages not as a fixed text but as a living play of variants, each retelling answering, inverting, or reworking the ones before it, often carrying its own distinct gendered logic (Ramanujan 1989, 246–55). A contemporary novelist's return to a folk motif, on this account, is not an isolated act of retrieval but a further move within a much older practice of telling and retelling, one that predates, and will likely outlast, the modern category of the solitary literary author.

A second pressure comes from the climate crisis. Realist fiction, the dominant mode of the modern novel, has often struggled to represent the scale and improbability of ecological emergency; as Amitav Ghosh argues, the serious literary novel has historically resisted the very storms, floods, and extinctions that now define our moment, and that resistance amounts to a broader imaginative failure (Ghosh 2016, 7–24). Ecological damage that unfolds too slowly and unevenly for the realist plot, what Rob Nixon has called "slow violence" (Nixon 2011, 2), may in fact be more legible in the cyclical, non-linear temporalities that myth and folktale have always used. Folklore, in other words, offers contemporary writers narrative resources that realism was never built to hold.

A third development is taking shape in memory studies, where Erol Gülüm has begun to treat folklore itself as a technology of memory: the selective, reconstructive work by which communities transmit and rework their lore at individual, collective, and cultural levels, for purposes specific to their present moment (Gülüm 2023). This builds on Astrid Erll's account of cultural remembering as not a private, psychological act but an ongoing social practice, continually reconstructed through media, ritual, and narrative (Erll 2011); folklore, on this view, is among the oldest such media a community has.

Taken together, these three developments suggest that the folkloric turn in contemporary writing is not a single trend but the convergence of several: a disciplinary recognition that folklore is a living form of knowledge, a formal practice of intertextual retelling that long precedes the novel, a response to the representational limits of realism under ecological crisis, and a memory practice suited to communities negotiating trauma, displacement, and rapid technological change all at once.

Reimagining Folklores in Contemporary South Asian Literature takes up this convergence directly. Reading folklore across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bhutan, and the diaspora as an active and adaptive form of knowledge rather than inherited ornament, the volume asks how the folk imagination continues to shape, and be reshaped by, the literatures of the region. It welcomes chapters that engage folklore as ecological knowledge, as historical and gendered memory, as a site of multispecies and caste based resistance, and, as a genuinely new line of inquiry within the field, as a form of thought in the algorithmic present.

We particularly welcome:

• Original, unpublished readings: nothing already in print or under review elsewhere
• Genuinely pan South Asian work, not only India centered scholarship
• Under discussed texts, authors, and regional or vernacular traditions, over extensively studied writers and canonical works
• Interdisciplinary approaches that draw on literary analysis, folklore studies, ecocriticism, memory studies, and gender and caste studies together, rather than treating these as separate lenses
• Submissions from emerging scholars, doctoral candidates, senior scholars, and faculty members, from India and abroad

Sub-themes (indicative, not exhaustive):

Folklore, Memory, and History

• Indigenous oral traditions and decolonial knowledge
• Folk memory, cultural trauma, and collective identity
• Myth, legend, and the rewriting of history
• Folklore and subaltern voices

Ecological and Multispecies Folklore

• Indigenous ecologies and environmental folklore
• Rivers, forests, and folk environmental ethics
• Animal folklore and posthuman discourses
• Water folklore and the blue humanities

Gender, Caste, and Community

• Gendered folklore and feminist revisions
• Queering South Asian folk narratives
• Caste, community, and folk discourses
• Dalit folklore and discursive resistance

Orality, Performance, and Form

• Language, orality, and discursive hybridity
• Performance, ritual, and oral storytelling
• Magical realism and folk imagination

Diaspora, Digital, and Folk Futures

• Migration, diaspora, and travelling folktales
• Folklore and digital storytelling
• AI, archives, and future folk traditions

These sections are indicative rather than exhaustive. Abstracts that work productively across categories, or that identify a compelling new line of inquiry within the volume's broader concerns, are equally welcome.

Important dates:

• Submission of abstract, chapter title, and bio note: October 31, 2026
• Notification of abstract acceptance: November 30, 2026

Submission guidelines:

• Prospective contributors are invited to submit an abstract only at this stage; complete chapters should not be sent.
• The abstract should be approximately 500 words in length and should set out the core argument, primary texts, and theoretical framework of the proposed chapter.
• Please ensure that the submitted title and abstract are original, plagiarism-free, and AI-free.
• The abstract, proposed chapter title, and a short bio-note of approximately 100 words (including the author’s designation, institutional affiliation, research interests, and publication record, with details of the publication house/publisher and year of publication) should be combined into a single Microsoft Word (.docx) file.
• The file should be named in the format Full Name_Abstract.docx.
• Manuscript text should be formatted in Times New Roman, 12 point, with the proposed chapter title set in 14 point.
• The completed file should be sent by email to southasianfolklorestudies@gmail.com, with the subject line "Chapter Abstract, Reimagining Folklores."
• Submissions should represent original, unpublished work; material already published, or currently under review or under acceptance elsewhere, will not be considered.

Editors:

For queries regarding the volume, contributors may write directly to the editors.

• Saswati Majhi, Assistant Professor of English, P P Savani University, India (saswatimajhi99@gmail.com)
• Arnab Das, Assistant Professor of English, P P Savani University, India (suvarnabdas@gmail.com)

References cited:

Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture. Translated by Sara B. Young. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gülüm, Erol. 2023. "Folkloric Memory: (Re)connecting the Dots for Broader Perspectives." Memory Studies 16 (6): 1466–83.

Korom, Frank J. 2017. "Introduction: Locating the Study of Folklore in Modern South Asian Studies." South Asian History and Culture 8 (4): 404–13.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ramanujan, A. K. 1989. "Telling Tales." Daedalus 118 (4): 238–61.