An Ocean of Stories
A look at Somadeva's 'Kathasaritsagara' and other related texts
India is often said to be the ‘cradle’ of all stories, the land from which stories spread far and wide across the world. The 11th-century collection of stories known as the the Kathasaritsagara certainly adds credence to that claim. The title, translated in full, means ‘the ocean of the rivers of story’, a name that immediately brings to mind the image of innumerable rivers of story and their tributary tales flowing into a vast ocean, which at last becomes filled with stories of every kind imaginable. For lovers of story, what could be more evocative than that?
So, what, then, is the Kathasaritsagara?
SOMADEVA’S KATHASARITSAGARA
The Kathasaritsagara was composed around 1070 CE by a Kashmiri Shaivite brahmin called Somadeva. It contains more than 350 tales told in more than twenty thousand slokas and is almost twice as long as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined. It is, for its size, the oldest extant collection of stories in the world. Continuing the metaphor in the title, Somadeva divided his work into one hundred and twenty-four chapters, which he called tarangas or ‘waves’.
The tales themselves are captivating. They draw the reader into a world full of clever women and fearless men, where kings, thieves, merchants, and courtesans rub shoulders with each other and magical beings such Gandharvas, Yakshas, and Vidyadharas abound. There is war and romance in the stories of Somadeva’s great work, and trickery, deceit, intrigue, and heroism, wit and yes, sometimes, even wisdom. The tales, though concerned with life and living, teach no moral lessons. Nor are they bound by any dominant theme, religion, or point of view. Their sole purpose, states Somadeva, is entertainment, a purpose they fulfill delightfully and well.
A powerful structural device common to many stories from India—including the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Panchatantra—is that of the framed narrative. An ‘outer’ or frame story holds within itself stories or sets of stories, which in turn may serve as frames for more stories. The frame story of Somadeva’s great work is the story of Prince Naravahanadatta, the future emperor of the Vidyadharas, semi-divine beings who possess magical, superhuman powers, including the ability to fly and to change their appearance at will. In his introduction, Somadeva makes it clear that it is the individual stories and not the main narrative that matters to him, and states that he has undertaken the composition of the Kathasaritsagara so that ‘several different stories may be easily remembered’. In his defence, it must be said that the story of Prince Naravahanadatta is fairly unexciting. It describes mainly his journey to becoming supreme ruler of the Vidyadharas—in the course of this, he marries twenty-six wives, each marriage extending his empire and political influence, and then fights a series of battles to defeat Vidyadhara princes who have refused to acknowledge his sovereignty. Somadeva takes every opportunity to insert in the main narrative subsidiary tales—which are vibrant, charming, and action-packed, in direct contrast to the relatively tame adventures of Naravahanadatta.
The Kathasaritsagara is also one of the most influential, non-religious works of Sanskrit literature. Its stories are found all over the world, from Celtic folklore and in collections such as the more or less contemporary Arabian Nights and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Its influence can be seen in the works of later writers such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387 CE) and Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353 CE). It has continued to inspire modern writers such as Salman Rushdie with his novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It is also the inspiration for the name of this newsletter!
WHO WAS SOMADEVA?
We know nothing about Somadeva except what he himself tells us in his Kathasaritsagara. In a short poem at the end of his work, he states that he was the court poet of King Anantadeva of Kashmir, and the son of a brahmin called Ramadevabhatta. He also states that he composed the work for the amusement of Queen Suryavati, wife of King Anantadeva, to distract her mind from its usual occupation of “worshipping Shiva and acquiring learning from the great books.”
The Rajatarangini, a chronicle of the kings of Kashmir written by the historian Kalhana in 1149 CE, tells us that the reign of King Anantadeva was one of political unrest, court intrigues, and bloodshed. In 1063, King Anantadeva gave up his throne to his eldest son Kalasha, but recovered it a few years later. In 1077, the king once again gave up his throne, but this time Kalasha openly attacked his father and took all his wealth. In 1081, the king killed himself in despair, and Suryavati threw herself onto his funeral pyre and perished. It was likely sometime between Anantadeva’s first and second giving up of his throne that Somadeva composed his Kathasaritsagara, possibly around 1070. The Rajatarangini, by giving us evidence of the reign of Anantadeva, supports the existence of Somadeva as a real, historical person, and helps us determine the time when he composed his great work. Usually, most works from medieval and ancient times are difficult to date. The fact that we can establish the date of the Kathasaritsagara with some certainty makes it quite unique.
AN OLDER, GREATER, COLLECTION OF TALES?
Indian texts were rarely the product of a single individual’s imagination, but were usually put together using stories from various sources and told by different storytellers. The genius of the author lay in weaving together the varied stories into a single, engaging, narrative. Somadeva, too, did not ‘invent’ the stories that make up the Kathasaritsagara—many of its tales can also be found in much older works, such as the Buddhist Jatakas, the Panchatantra, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas. These stories had probably existed for centuries, preserved and shared orally long before they were ever written down or became a part of Somadeva’s text.
Somadeva himself tells us that his Kathasaritsagara is drawn from a much older, and greater, collection of tales written down by Gunadhya called the Brihatkatha, or Great Tale. This greater collection of tales, says Somadeva, is now lost.
GUNADHYA’S BRIHATKATHA
Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagara opens with the legendary history of Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha. The initial chapters relate how the goddess Parvati asks her beloved, the god Shiva, to tell her a story that no one has ever heard before. Shiva proceeds to narrate to her the adventures of seven Vidyadhara princes. Unfortunately, Shiva is overheard by Pushpadanta, one of his attendants. Pushpadanta relates the story to his own wife, Jaya, who is one of Parvati’s attendants. Jaya, delighted by the story, narrates it to Parvati, who is furious that Shiva told her a story that even her handmaid already knew. She curses Pushpadanta to be reborn on earth as a mortal, and when Malyavan, another of Shiva’s attendants, tries to speak up on his behalf, she curses him too. The two attendants are born upon earth as Vararuchi and Gunadhya respectively. Their curse, says the goddess, will end when Pushpadanta as Vararuchi has related the story to the pishacha Kanabhuti, and when Malyavan as Gunadhya has heard the tale from Kanabhuti and spread it far and wide across the earth.
It all happens as the goddess decrees, and when Gunadhya hears the tale from Kanabhuti, he writes it all down, all the adventures of the seven Vidyadhara princes, in his own blood, and in Paishachi, the language of the pishachas. This great story, told in seven hundred thousand verses, is the Brihatkatha.
Gunadhya’s students present this story to a Satavahana king who rejects it in disgust. “Though the tale is an impressive seven hundred thousand verses long, it is in Paishachi, a language without beauty! And the words are written in blood! Throw away this dreadful work!” he declares scornfully.
Gunadhya, hearing the king’s response, is overcome with sorrow and goes with his students to a hill not far away, where, in a lonely but pleasant spot, he makes a sacred fire.
Then he took the pages of the book one by one, and after reading them aloud to the birds and animals, threw them into the fire. His students looked on with tears in their eyes. For the sake of his students, because they especially liked it, he kept back one story—this was the story of the adventures of Prince Naravahanadatta, told in a hundred thousand verses. As Gunadhya stood reading out and burning the other stories, all the wild animals—deer, buffalo, boars, rhinos—gathered in a circle around him, listening with tear-filled eyes.
When the king hears of this phenomenon, he comes to see it for himself, and realising that he was in the presence of one of Shiva’s attendants, begs him for the divine tale told by Shiva. But by then Gunadhya has burnt six of the stories in six hundred thousand verses, and only the story of Naravahanadatta remains. The king accepts the story and declares that it must be preserved.
The king then adds to the tale an introduction that tells the story of how Pushpadanta and Malyavan were cursed, how Gunadhya wrote the Brihatkatha, and his own role in preserving and spreading across the earth the last one hundred thousand verses of the divine story. This introduction, called Kathapitha, and the adventures of Naravahanadatta together form the Kathasaritsagara.
The Kathasaritsagara, then, itself states that it has been drawn from Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha, a significantly larger collection of tales, composed much earlier and in a different language, and that most of this larger work has been lost. Also, to make matters more complicated, it states that these tales have a celestial origin, since they were first told by Shiva to Parvati!
Setting aside the question of the divine origin of the tales, we now have in Gunadhya the supposed original author of the tales.
WHO WAS GUNADHYA?
Who, then, was Gunadhya? Did he really exist? Or is he a mere character, created by Somadeva to hold these tales together? We do not know for certain, but many scholars such as J.A.B van Buitenen believe that Gunadhya did exist, and lived and wrote sometime during the fourth and fifth centuries CE, during India’s Golden Age under the Gupta kings. This was the most prosperous period in India’s history, when great cities such as Ujjayini, Kaushambi, Takshashila, Mathura, and Tamralipti arose and became centres of trade with China and Rome, when Indian merchants set sail to the east in search of gold and India’s wealth and prosperity were known throughout the world. Others of the same opinion, such as F.W. Thomas, suggest that Gunadhya himself probably travelled a lot, along the busy trade routes that connected the rich and bustling ports and cities of the subcontinent, and collected the stories he heard on his travels, stringing them together into a single work with the help of his frame story, the adventures of Prince Naravahanadatta.
In most Indian texts, the creators/authors appeared within the text itself to play an important role in the development of the story. For instance, Vishnusharma, the author of the Panchatantra, is also the teacher of the three dull-witted princes for whom the fables were composed, and Valmiki, the author of the Sanskrit Ramayana, is also the sage in whose hermitage Sita takes refuge, and who teaches her sons the story of Rama, their father, and thus composes the Ramayana. Similarly, Gunadhya appears as a character in his own work, as the cursed attendant of Shiva, charged with the task of spreading this celestial tale far and wide upon the earth—though unlike the others, he tells his own story in the first person, in his own voice, rather than in the third person.
Somadeva breaks tradition completely. He does not appear at all in his Kathasaritsagara except in the epilogue—to praise his royal patrons, offer them his work, and state that his stories are drawn from Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha. This seems to confirm Gunadhya as the ‘original’ author (or compiler) of the tales, and Somadeva as their reteller.
THE BUDDHIST CONNECTION
The Kathasaritsagara states that Gunadhya composed the Brihatkatha in the language of the Pishachas, the ghosts and sprites that inhabit burning grounds and crematoria. Scholars believe that Paishachi was a real, human, language, and that it was used by some Buddhist sects—which indicates a possible Buddhist setting or origin for Gunadhya’s work.
Somadeva lived and wrote at a time both Buddhism and Shaivism were important in Kashmir. He dedicated his work to Shiva, perhaps because that was the religion of the king and queen, but also includes within it stories about Buddhism and the Buddha, indicating the place that Buddhism occupied in the social and cultural landscape of Kashmir at the time. Somadeva composed his own Kathasaritsagara in Sanskrit, which was in his time the language favoured for literary composition.
RETELLINGS, TRANSLATIONS AND RELATED TEXTS
Gunadhya’s BRIHATKATHA:
Did the complete Brihatkatha, containing the adventures of all seven Vidyadhara princes, ever actually exist? Did Gunadhya really write and then destroy the first six parts of his great story, saving only the seventh tale, that of Prince Naravahanadatta? We will never know for certain. Fortunately, several retellings of the seventh tale survive, with Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagara, as the longest and most detailed of the retold versions, being the most important.
The oldest known version of Gunadhya’s tale is a Jain narrative called Vasudevahindi, or ‘The Wanderings of Vasudeva’, written in Old Jain Maharashtri Prakrit sometime before the 6th century CE. This tells of the adventures of Krishna Vasudeva, the equivalent of Naravahanadatta, in the course of acquiring various wives. Two versions of this exist, the first written by the Jain grammarian Sanghadasagani, and the second (also known as the Majjhimakhanda or ‘Medium-length Saga’) composed by Dharmadasagani.
Tales from the Brihatkatha were known in southern India at least from the 8th century CE and many of its main characters are mentioned in works of Tamil literature. It is not certain how these stories found their way to the south, though inscriptions say that the Ganga king, Durvinita, had rendered the Brihatkatha in Sanskrit. Soon after this, a southern Indian Jain text called Perunkatai or ‘The Great Story’ was written in Tamil. Its author is known only as Konkuvel or ‘chieftain of the Konku country’. Its relationship to the Brihatkatha was realised only as recently as 1906, when it was pointed out by the Tamil scholar S. Krishnaswamy Aiyangar. The text deals mainly with the story of King Udayana (the father of Naravahanadatta; his story precedes that of his son), and appears to be a more complete and less corrupted version of the tale. It is thus perhaps closer to Gunadhya’s original than the later Sanskrit retellings. This text is also known as Utayanan Katai (‘The Story of Udayana’), Konkuvel Makkatai (‘The Great Story Written by the Chieftain of the Konku Country’), or simply as Katai or ‘Story’.
Two other, additional, versions of the Udayana story are found in southern India. The first is a Sanskrit work called Uditodayacharitam, written in the 12th century CE by one Shikhamani Shastri, a Jain born in the southern Indian town of Shrishailam. This work seems to be very closely derived from Konkuvel’s Perunkatai. The other work is the Tamil Utayanakumara Kaviyam, which tells the story of Udayana in a much-condensed form, in 367 stanzas divided into six parts.
In addition to Somadeva’s composition, there exist two more Sanskrit retellings of Gunadhya’s great story. The oldest of these is the Brihatkathaslokasangraha or ‘Summary in Verse of the Great Story’. Composed by Budhasavamin in the 7th or 8th century CE, it tells the main story of Prince Naravahanadatta in detail and only occasionally adds other tales. It is considered by many to be the most charming and vivacious of the retellings of the Brihatkatha. The surviving text is, unfortunately, incomplete, and breaks off while Naravahanadatta is in pursuit of the sixth of his twenty-six wives.
The other Sanskrit retelling is the Brihatkathamanjari or ‘Blossoms of the Great Story’, written by the Kashmiri poet Kshemendra in 1037, only a few decades before Somadeva wrote his Kathasaritsagara. Kshemendra was well known as a poet, and was especially renowned for his abridged retellings of the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. However, Kshemendra’s retelling of the Brihatkatha is regarded as much inferior to Somadeva’s in terms of language, style, and metrical skill. It is also only a third as long as the Kathasaritsagara.
Kshemendra and Somadeva were contemporaries, and both lived and wrote in Kashmir. Their respective retellings are also the only two complete versions of the story. In 1871, the scholar George Buhler proved two interesting facts—first, that Kshemendra and Somadeva used the same source text for their works, and second, that they worked completely independently of each other. Unfortunately, their source text is irrevocably lost to time. Could it have been Gunadhya’s original, Paishachi composition? Or, as seems more likely, a version of it, perhaps written in some form of Prakrit? We will never know for sure.
Other important collections of stories derived from or related to Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha include the Vetala-panchaviṃshatika (Twenty-five Tales of a Vetala), Shukasaptati (The Seventy Stories of a Parrot), and the Siṃhasana-dvatrim-satika (Thirty-two Stories of a Royal Throne).
Somadeva’s KATHASARITSAGARA
Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagara, almost like its source text, Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha, has been translated and retold several times since it was written.
One of its earliest translations was commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar (r.1556-1605), who came to know of the Kathasaritsagara on a visit to Srinagar after his conquest of Kashmir in 1589 and shortly afterwards ordered it to be translated into Persian. This translation was also lavishly illustrated. Unfortunately, most of the original manuscript was lost and today only nineteen illustrations survive from this translation, scattered in museums and private collections around the world.
The Kathasaritsagara came to the attention of western literary scholarship only as late as 1824 when the Orientalist H.H Wilson published, in English, a summary of the first five chapters of Somadeva’s work. In 1862, Herman Brockhaus published a complete version of Somadeva’s Sanskrit text from six different manuscripts and re-organised Somadeva’s one hundred and twenty-four chapters or tarangas into the eighteen parts or lambakas of the version available to us today. (In older retellings of the Brihatkatha the chapters were organised into twenty-six lambakas, corresponding to Naravahanadatta’s winning of his twenty-six wives; this correspondence was lost with Brockhaus’ reorganization).
The Kathasaritsagara was first translated into English by Charles Henry Tawney and published in two volumes by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1880 and 1884, and then again in the 1920s, this time with extensive notes by N.M. Penzer. Tawney used Brockhaus’s version as well as three other manuscripts for his translation, which remains the only complete English translation of the Kathasaritsagara to date.
In 1889, the Nirnaysagar Press in Bombay published Durgadas’ Sanskrit edition of the Kathasaritsagara. This was compiled from the Brockhaus version and two other manuscripts. This is now regarded as the definitive edition of Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagara, and is the one used most often for translations.
In 1994, Penguin Books India brought out Tales from the Kathasaritsagara; translated by Arshia Sattar, this collection of selected stories is also based on the Durgadas edition.
A complete translation by Sir James Mallinson was to be published in seven volumes by the Clay Sanskrit Library, but eventually only two volumes were brought out—in 2007 and 2009.
It has also been translated into Kannada, as Kathaamrita, by A. R. Krishnashastry in 1952 and into Malayalam, as Sri Somadevabattante Kathasaritsagaram, by P. C. Devassia, in 1978. Several translations in Hindi also exist.
A recent retelling of the Kathasaritsagara is that by Malaysian writer Uthaya Sankar SB in Bahasa Malaysia. His retelling focuses on the first five lambakas.
My own, considerably abridged, retelling of Somadeva’s work in English, was brought out by Puffin India in 2019. I have based my version mainly on C.H. Tawney’s translation. I have chosen the stories so that they represent, as far as possible, the extent, scope and structure of the whole of the original, though, given that my retelling is aimed at a younger audience, I have had to be somewhat judicious in my choice of tales!
SOURCES: I have consulted a variety of sources for this post, including articles from JSTOR, Tawney’s translation, Mallinson’s translation, and my own retelling of the Kathasaritsgara. Space constraints do not allow me to give a detailed list here. Please get in touch with me via email for a list if needed, or write in via the comments button below.
Very interesting to learn not only about the histories but also the myths behind the great stories!