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This article, which draws on the author’s research experience on North Indian literatures, traces the genealogy of scholarship on Indian oral traditions in France. By assessing the situation of orality in the history of Indian literatures and the classifications used to study these corpuses, this article reconstructs the different steps that have helped to transgress the partitions in the field between “literature,” “orature” and “folklore.” It also calls for a de-compartmentalization of disciplines and of area studies, by focusing on the pivotal role of orality, which concerns literature as much as anthropology.