Myths and Legends of India
Sunday Herald, Delhi 4. 9. 03  (Prema Nandakumar)
 
What a beauty to adorn our drawing rooms, kept with studied carelessness on that corner Chinese tea table!  How magnetizing a theatrum mundi where human passions are acted out by Gods and demons!  What we miss in the Viking edition are those evocative illustrations gathered from British Library and Victoria and Albert Picture Library in Great Britain that punctuated Radice’s story telling in the Folio Society edition.  Of Ganesa and Kartikeya at playing using skulls for balls, Hanuman struggling with Ravana, and Krishna nonchalantly sporting with various cowherdesses.  But no matter.  Myths and Legends of India “is the authors reckless attempt to explore the Ocean of Somadeva’s Katha Sarit Sagara”, and the verbal presentation is itself highly visual.  Besides there are the paintings of Raga Megha (17th Century) and Rudra Roop Hanuman (18th Century) on the cover for us to gaze along with  a couple of swan-messengers to punctuate our readings.
 
With additions from epics and folk tales to Somadeva’s classic, we are in for a great adventure.  As a grandmother I am tired of repeating the familiar stories to my grandchildren: the jackal that rejected the grapes as sour, the monkey that ate the whole chapatti while dividing it between the two cats, the mouse that was supposed to have eaten away the coins in a bundle.  Now I need feel bored no more.  Here is the monkey Ala who could swallow and regurgitate a thousand golden mohurs; we then jostle with the waves of miracles, slurping the carefully inserted erotica, hold out our hands for the muri and sandesh that pours from the magic pot of the Brahmin and run away when he upturns the pot containing goblins, as the grandchildren open their eyes wider and wider about the dog-mother who gave birth to human children and whisk!  Fly up in the sky behind Putraka wearing the magic shoes.
 
One marvels at the amount of racial wisdom imbedded in these tales that have sculpted the Indian down the centuries.  Ambition is never shunned but greed is self defeating; heroism is welcome but foolhardiness is rejected; scholarship is fine but one’s intelligence is more important; chastity never goes unrewarded, the king who fails to protect his people gets destroyed in the end; family togetherness is a priceless virtue.
 
Apart from Somadeva, William Radice has also lovingly gathered crisp tales from folklore, Buddhist cycles (and, briefly, Jain) and the Mahabharata.  Radice sees the epic as “a bridge between mythology and history and as an endlessly expandable vessel into which every kind of story can be poured”.  Selections from the epic come in the crystalline translation of Purushottama Lal.  We have here the story of Sakuntala and Yayati, which are which are unflattering to the male ego, the familiar incidents like the dice game and the death of Abhimanyu.  Lal’s majestic diction when dealing with Samvarana and Tapati reflects accurately the stately and stark poetry of Vyasa:
 
                    There was none among the gods,
                    anti-gods, Rakshasas, Yakshas,
                    Apsaras and Gandharvas,
                    To equal her beauty:
 
                    Symmetrical figure
                    Faultless features
                    Large black eyes
                    Elegantly dressed
                    Chaste and sweet-tempered.
 
Interestingly enough, the translation is done in such a way as to make easy reading for children as well.  Draupadi’s swayamvara thus becomes ideal to spread the wings of the storyteller’s imagination when surrounded by children:
 
                    Each mansion had a hundred
                    doors, each wide enough to admit
                    a crowd; lavish metal-cast beds
                    in it – it looked like a
 
                    Himalayan hill.  In these mansions
                    Were accommodated the Kings,
                    (who came resplendent with ornaments),
                    each hopeful of winning Draupadi.
 

The critical introduction by William Radice points out the differences between the genre-terms very well:
 
Myths are about gods or demons, and are not historical.  Legends are about human beings – though gods may intervene – and they purport to be historical and may or may not have an actual historical basis.  Folk-tales stem from smaller communities: from speakers of a common dialect, from those familiar with a particular locality.  They are usually not directly linked to the big picture that myths give us, or to the pseudo-historicity of legends.
 
Ultimately, who are gods?  Who are the demons?  And, who are the human beings?  And to what genus of imagination belong the animals, birds and reptiles?  The experiential wisdom of India seems to say that everyone has a little of everybody else in himself.  Even diseases can be a s human, godly or devilish as the rest!  ‘The Invincible Plague’ has Shiva’s Nandi protecting India struggling to keep the vile shape of plague away from the nation’s borders and learning to his distress that it is not plague that kills people but the “fear of plague”!
 
The very net of our kathak is very wide.  The myths fostered by the Syrian Christians of Kerala fondly recalling the apostle St Thomas find a place in the volume too.  Looking on at the God’s Plenty given by Radice, the temptation of the neo-modern critics is hard to resist.  How significant is Myths and Legends of India as a bi-cultural text, transposing the oriental culture into that of the occident?  But the wise refrain from murdering just to have the pleasure of dissecting a full-blown lotus with criticalotry, and I am already on my way to gather the unfading lotus that deflects all poison.  Then I would be going to attend the party set up by Thunder and Lightning “with hot curries steaming and sizzling like the fire of the lightning, festive fire-crackers booming like thunder, and sweets with silver foil on them laid out in dazzling patterns on gleaming gold dishes.”
 

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