Hi folks, The discussion about 'brass razoo' reminded me of my late grandfather's tales of his militiary escapades in India (and later in Europe during WW1. Back in the late 1940s, when by this time he had three grandchildren, he wrote a fantasy children's book called "The Gubbazoo" - it was a story based on a friendly flying brontosaurus rex - style dinosaur which gave children rides on its back as it flew them high over the countryside. It wasn't scarey - or not that I recall!! I'm wondering if Gubbazoo has some connection to Indian mythical tales and if so what sort of creature is/was it? Cheers Ainslie

My wife's has a book entitled ' Folk Tales of Bengal' published in the 1880s which has a lot of fantastic stories. Recently, we re-read the book. It makes fantastic reading. Mike -----Original Message----- From: Ainslie <woodart@woodart.com.au> To: india-british-raj <india-british-raj@rootsweb.com> Sent: Fri, Jul 13, 2012 6:56 am Subject: [INDIA-BRITISH-RAJ] Words of Indian origin. Hi folks, The discussion about 'brass razoo' reminded me of my late grandfather's tales of his militiary escapades in India (and later in Europe during WW1. Back in the late 1940s, when by this time he had three grandchildren, he wrote a fantasy children's book called "The Gubbazoo" - it was a story based on a friendly flying brontosaurus rex - style dinosaur which gave children rides on its back as it flew them high over the countryside. It wasn't scarey - or not that I recall!! I'm wondering if Gubbazoo has some connection to Indian mythical tales and if so what sort of creature is/was it? Cheers Ainslie ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to INDIA-BRITISH-RAJ-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Dear Ainslie, Indian folklore is full of mythical creatures. And from place to place, from language to language--we have around 15 official languages and many many dialects-- and from culture to culture, they take different forms and different names but you often notice a common thread in most of these stories. Many scholars have collected them into books, A K Ramanujan one of the most famous among them. His *Folk Tales from India* and *Flowering Tree* are two books that comes to mind readily. But while writing his his book, I feel J J Stroud may have been influenced by the most popular of these stories in India-- that of the mythical bird, Jatayu. It is a bird with with many human qualities, and it appears in the epic *Ramayana* where Jatayu tries to stop the demon king Ravana of southern island of Lanka when he was abducting Sita, wife of Prince Rama of Ayodhya, in his aeroplane called Pushpak. Ravana strikes him down with his sword, clipping his wings and the bird falls like a mountain to the earth. In Trivandrum, on the southern tip of Indian sub-continent, there is a hill called Jatayuppara, the Jatayu Rock,which folktales say is the place where the bird hit the land. he became a mountain and the hill looks like huge bird resting. Well, you have many such places all over India where the folks tell you the connection with mythical characters like Sita, Rama, Ravana, Sugreeva and Bali, the monkey kings and many many others.