Myths and Legends of India (Volume 1)

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Since time immemorial, India has been an ocean bed over which numerous stories have flowed and enriched the world. Storytellers from Tulsidas to Rohinton Mistry have added their magic to this magnificent repository. Inspired in part by Somadeva's Kathasaritasagara, William Radice collects these timeless tales of India, and tells them anew through his unique idiom. Like itinerant storytellers, he fills these tales with emotion and wit, bringing them alive for the contemporary reader.

William Radice has pursued a double career as a poet, and as a scholar and translator of Bengali. Well known for his translations of the poems and stories of Tagore, he has also published nine books of his own poems. He taught Bengali language and literature at SOAS, University of London, from 1988 to 2011. His literary work in recent years has included opera libretti, and his many books include Complete Bengali and The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad as well as Myths and Legends of India. His translation of Tagore's Gitanjali was published in 2011, the 150th anniversary of the poet's birth. It aims to shed an entirely new light on the book that won Tagore the Nobel Prize.

Salman Rushdie used an ancient and familiar image when he wrote his enchanting fable about the storyteller Rashid and his son Haroun, in which Rashid's storytelling gift is suddenly cut off when Kattam- Shud-the evil Prince of Silence-poisons 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.