Old Deccan Days or Hindoo Fairy Legends

Front Cover

Back Cover

Excerpt:

Old Deccan Days is the outcome of a remarkable collaboration between Anna Liberata de Souza, a gifted South Indian storyteller who worked as an ayah or nursemaid in British colonial households, and Mary Eliza Isabella Frere, a sensitive young British woman, whose father, Sir Bartle Frere, was the governor of Bombay. Anna Liberata de Souza had a Portuguese name because her grandparents were Christian converts. In the 1860s, when she worked in the Frere household, she was about fifty years old. Her association with Mary Frere must have begun in 1863 when Mary at eighteen, arrived from England to join her father.