Tales are ubiquitous in the literary culture of pre-modern North India, as elsewhere, and they come in all shapes, languages and inflections. For this reason, tracking them allows us to travel into and across most of the milieux of this multilingual literary culture. But precisely because of their ubiquity, when we move from the micro level of individual texts to the macro level of literary culture and historical processes, it becomes difficult to say anything more than ‘they were there, they circulated, they usually retold the same stories in new ways or mixed familiar elements to produce new narratives’. Yet if we pay precise attention to their articulation and re-articulation of cultural and social imaginaries, the particular linguistic textures and aesthetic emphasis, material form and evidence of patronage, the shifting extent of circulation and popularity, we can use the longuedurée history of the katha genre to illuminate the historical dynamics of cultural and aesthetic change in the region in ways that intersect, connect and question macro-historical narratives of dynastic and epochal change.

中文翻译：

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流派的社会史

故事在前现代北印度的文学文化中无处不在，就像其他地方一样，它们以各种形式、语言和变化出现。出于这个原因，追踪它们使我们能够进入和穿越这种多语言文学文化的大部分环境。但正因为它们无处不在，当我们从个别文本的微观层面转移到文学文化和历史进程的宏观层面时，除了“它们在那里，它们在流传，它们通常会重述同样的故事”之外，就很难再说什么了。以新的方式或混合熟悉的元素来产生新的叙事”。然而，如果我们精确地关注他们对文化和社会想象的表达和重新表达、特定的语言结构和审美重点、物质形式和赞助的证据，