THE RIVER OF STORIES

Within its vast frame, the Kathasaritasagara has several hundred stories that owe their origin to India’s limitless storehouse of myth, scripture, and folklore. Snake gods rub shoulders with enchanted princesses, and heroic warrior kings battle rakshasas tall as the sky and wide as the ocean. Celestial apsaras seduce handsome princes, wise prostitutes counsel errant husbands, fools parley with ghouls, and riddlers and talking monkeys pace through the tales. Here you will find talking birds and swindlers, beggars and conjurers, sages and polymaths, divine beings and semi divine vidyadharas, yakshas and yoginis, walking corpses and sleeping giants, and a host of other remarkable creatures mingling with ordinary men and women in a multitude of magical kingdoms, enchanted islands, and forbidding forests in the three worlds – heaven, earth, and the nether world, and through this skein of stories contained in 18 books, Somadeva spins tales of love, infidelity, death rebirth, sacrifice, fulfillment, courage, cowardliness, honesty, untruth, separation, togetherness, joy, sadness, and much, much more.

The Kathasaritasagara of Somadeva

Meena Arora Nayak

456pp, ~999, Aleph