William Radice - Myths and Legends of India Vol. 1

He caught his breath. The Ocean of the Streams of Story, said the Water Genie, his blue whiskers bristling with pride. Wasnt it worth travelling so far and fast to see? Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie used an ancient and familiar image when he wrote his enchanting fable about the storyteller Rashid and his son Haroun, in which Rashids storytelling gift is suddenly cut off when Kattam-Shudthe evil Prince of Silencepoisons and attempts to plug Kahani, the Sea of Stories. In about AD 1070, Somadeva, a Kashmiri Brahmin, wrote in Sanskrit his enormous and celebrated masterpiece, the Kathasaritsagara, which means the ocean [sagara] of streams [sarit] of story [katha]. Several of the stories in the present volume have been taken from that collection, which is like Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer and La Fontaine rolled into one; and versions of many stories that I have taken from other sources can also be found in it. Somadeva understood that, in Indian tradition, myths and legends and folk tales shade into one another, and that together they form a unity.

The metaphor of an ocean seems to be the only one huge and capacious enough to represent something so fluid, so deep, so changeable in mood, so beautiful yet often so frightening. The volumes that follow here are my own, reckless attempt to explore that Ocean. I invite you, the reader, to set sail with me, and stay aboard for as long as your daring or your energy lasts. You may sometimes feelas I often did when writing the bookthat you are in danger of sinking. But when you reach the shore again, I think you will feel exhilarated, and your life will never be the same again. As a specialist in Bengali language and literature, I have often been aware that the literary works I have studied or translated are like ships floating on the Indian Ocean of Stories.

By using dictionaries and reference books I have tried to understand what they owe to the Ocean; how, without it, they wouldnt float at all. But one has to embark on a longer, riskier voyageas, for the first time, I have in this bookto appreciate its full extent and variety. To convey that range, here are some notes on just a few of the ships in which I have previously sailed. Some of them, through translation or through transformation into divergent media, have travelled to other oceans, to float on waters from the Western tradition. The Poetry of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (18241873). Acknowledged as the founder of modern Bengali poetry and drama, Madhusudan could not have conceived his masterpiece, the epic poem Meghnad Badh Kabya, written in the early 1860s, without Indias epic and mythological tradition. Based on the story of the Ramayanawhich tells of the abduction of Ramas wife, Sita, by Ravana, the demonic king of Lanka, and her rescue by Rama and his brother Lakshmana, assisted by the monkey-god Hanumanit concentrates on the death of Ravanas son Meghnad and on Ravanas final defeat, projecting both father and son as tragic heroes rather than as demons.

Madhusudan was a Christian convert, and was very well read in European literature. His poem was influenced in its structure and tone by Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton; but the depths of the Ocean on which he sailed were Indian. He made this plain in his exuberant English letters: I am going on with Meghnad by fits and starts. Perhaps the poem will be finished by the end of the year. I am glad you like the opening lines. I must tell you, my dear fellow, that though, as a jolly Christian youth, I dont care a pins head for Hinduism, I love the grand mythology of our ancestors.

It is full of poetry. A fellow with an inventive head can manufacture the most beautiful things out of it. Madhusudan was the subject of my D.Phil. thesis (1987); but I havent really plumbed his mythological depths until now. The Poetry of Rabindranath Tagore (18611941). The great Bengali poet, whose works I have been reading and translating for most of my adult life, constructed numerous ships that sailed on the Ocean, and several of them can be found in the Selected Poems of Tagore that I translated for Penguin. Another fine poem by Tagore, not included in my Penguin book, is To Ahalya, first published in 1890.

In The Seduction of Ahalya (Volume Two, pp. 9092), I have retold the various versions that exist of this myth. In his poem, Tagore does not focus on how or why Ahalya was cursed; instead, he is fascinated by her state of consciousness after she has been turned into a stone, and by what goes through her mind when she is restored to life by the touch of Ramas foot. At the end of the poem, Tagore himself uses an ocean metaphor, which will remind Indian readers of the emergence of Vishnus wife, Lakshmi, from the churning of the primeval World-Ocean, and Westerners of Botticellis