Stuart Blackburn lived in Melur and its surrounding villages for two and a half years in the 1970s
as a Peace Corps volunteer. After his doctoral dissertation at Berkeley (1980), he taught at several
universities, primarily SOAS in London. Research for various periods from the 1970s to the present,
mostly in South India but more recently Arunachal Pradesh, has led to the publication of more than
a dozen books on folklore, oral traditions and literature. This is his first novel.
