KathaSaritSagar - An Ocean of Stories

Who doesn’t love stories? From children to adult all of us love stories. For those who are in my age group and grown in either villages or small towns of India, the childhood memories will be full of stories that they would have heard from their mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, teacher or anybody else. Also there were comics and books like Chandamama, Balamitra (Chandoba in Marathi) and Amarchitra katha.


These stories used to take us into the world of imagination, where we used to see kings, queens, wicked witches, ghosts, rakshasas and what not. These used to build our imagination and they were our only source of entertainment other than the street games. Television came much later, with a single channel doordarshan!!



Most of my childhood, I used to spend more time in library rather than playing. I used to love reading books. Stories are a good tool to teach, make a point clear and also build good qualities in the reader. Unknowingly, the sub-conscious mind will absorb the teachings, when reading something interesting. We would not forget these teachings very easily. Compare it to a boring PPT presentation in corporate world!! You will understand what I mean.



One might have read about stories of Panchtantra, Eesopes fables, Vetala Pancha vimshati, Raja Vikramaditya’s stories or the students of Sanskrit might have read about the drama such as Swapna vasavadatta. Did you know that source of all these stories is same and it is a work created around 1st BC or 1st AD? Some may know or some may not. Even those who know, may not know what that original work is about and how captivating, imaginative it could be. I bet it is much better than the currently popular Stories of Narnia or Harry Potter series, authors of these stories would have got influenced by this original work, at some time or the other.



What I am talking about here is a work called “Brihat Katha”, originally written around 1st BC or 1st AD, when Shatavahana dynasty had started. It was written in language called “Paishachi”, a tribal dialect spoken by the “Pishacha” tribe living in the jungles. It was written by a author called “Gunadya” in his own blood, so that it is not stolen by Vidhyadharas and also as he had no ink in the forest, as stated in KathaSaritSagar.



The prevalent language for creating any literary work in that era was either Sanskrit, which was majorly used or at the most Prakrit. Gunadhya chose to write in Paishachi language as he had taken a vow at that point time, that he would not speak in any of the prevalent languages such as Sanskrit, Prakrit and his native language(Desh). This description is also part of this book.



This great literary work has then travelled to different parts of the world and hence even today we can find some similarities between our folk tales and the folk tales from other parts of the world. This work was later translated into Sanskrit by a poet by name Somadeva Bhatta in the court of Kashmiri king.

To give you a glimpse of the size of this work, it consists of 18 books of 124 chapters and more than 21,000 verses in addition to prose sections. (Wikipedia)



The story narration style is also very interesting. To all those geeks out there, to explain in your own language it is like a main program which is running and then there would be a function call, which will call one more function, which further calls one and the flow subsequently returns back successively to the main program. Main program would continue for some more time with again with a fresh nested function call.



To make it clear to all those non-geeks, there would be a main story running. A character in the main story, to illustrate what it is saying would start telling a story. In that story again a character to make a point clear would tell one more short story. As the stories get over the flow returns back to the main story and main story continues. It is very interesting style of storytelling and very captivating too.



This story is about the story of 7 Vidhyadhar kings and associated stories. At present only the story of 1 Vidhyadhar king, Naravahanadatta, son of famed kind Udayana. (Do you remember famous Sanskrit play “Swapna Vasava Datta”?) All other stories were burnt by the Gunadya himself and why he did so is also part of the story. Originally it contained 700,000 couplets and it took seven years for him to complete this work.



I was lucky to get the copy of translated Katha sarith sagara, translated into Kannada, printed and published in 1936 by Pandit Chidambara Shastry. I read it during my second year of Engineering and it mesmerized me so much, I am a great fan of it. I regret, I could not get other volumes then. But now I have found a scanned copy of original English translation, by C.H. TAWNEY, Published in 1880. I can’t wait to read it.

I will sign off here and do share with me your memories of stories heard in childhood.