I Story of the Tongue and the . Text The Narrative Tradition Gulam mohammed Sheikh Somadeva 1 s Kathasaritsa3ar believed to be an abridged version of Gunadhya 1 s Brihatkatha now lost, ovens with Parvati coaxing Shiva to regale her with stories never 1 told before . Shiva reminds Parvati of her all-knowing powers and parries her with the story of her own past life. She chides him for not taking her seriously. Put to his mettle Shi va muses The devas are ever too self- contented and mortals perennially in distress, neither really \vould make ideal material for stories, so I 1 ll · tell the 2 tales of the Vidyadharas for they quintessentially combine human and divine nature. Parvati desires exclusivity and orders Nandi to guard the entrance from intruders. However, Push~adanta, a favourite p,ana (attendant) of Shiva, curious at the goings-on in the secret enclosure enters invisibly by yogic powers to share the stories. \rJhen Parvati finds out, she curses him to go through a cycle of life as a mortal. Another gana who pleads for mercy meets a similar predicament, is cursed, but succeeds in extracting a boon of deliverance. The liberation of the first gana born as the great grammarian Vararuchi depends upon his meeting an accursed e .arth spirit yaksha , reborn as · •. 2 •• demon, a pishacha in the deep Vindhya forests. This would enable him to regain memory of his past life and recite the tales he had heard from Shiva to the yaksha-pishacha. The deliverance of the yaksha himself from the pi.shacha yoni could take place only on his conveying the tales to the second gana, now born as the archetypal disseminator of Brihatkatha, Gunadhya - who in turn would find freedom from his curse by transmitting the tales to the world. The yaksha-pishacha conveys the tales (told originally in Sanskrit ?) in the lowly Pai.shachi tongue to Gunadhya, who inscribes these seven great tales - mahakathas - in seven lakh couplets, shlokas in his own blood (for want of ink in the fares t) . The rnanusc ripts are then offered to the Satavahana king by his pupils. The king spurns the offer of the blood-stained and lengthy tales in the lowly Paishachi language. Heart-broken Gunadhya makes a fire-pit ( agni -kunda) in the · forest to recite the tales for the last time before consigning them to flames. Six out of seven volumes are lost to posterity before the penitent king, brought to reason by sorrowing birds and beasts ?tarving in sympathy with the scribe - a less succulent cuisine on the king' s dining platter rushes out to a ~~lvage the remnants. .. 3 .. 3 The subsequent tales told in what Basham calls a 'boxed in' story- within- a -story format include tales of Vararuchi who gets falsely implicated in an illicit liaison with a queen, of dead fish in the market laughing at the folly of a gullible king (reminiscent of a similar instance in the Arabian Nights); of clever prostitutes, virtuous and promiscuous wives; of the friendly Jor vicious rakshasas (demons); of a floating hand in the river and of flying slippers; of princess Patali and the founding of the capital city, Pataliputra; of a Brahmana 4 Indradatta who having powers of parakayapravesh enters the corpse of the last Shudra king Nanda and gets forever trapped in the a 1 i en body as his ovvn left wi t h a friend for safe-keeping gets cremated. The kaleidoscope is full of numerous resonant tales of various dimensions and purport. In short, ·the preamble of Kathasaritsagar sets the tenor of the vast oceanic narration it is about to unravel. The deceptively simple, arbitrary sounding introduction ·conceals innuendoes and camouflages amazing complexity. The reference to secrecy and to sharing, the choice of Vidyadharas ra~her than mortals or the devas to represent the spectrum of life, the recurrence of th~ motif of the •. 4 •. curse, the powers of parakayapravesh and co-existence of the historical with fictional and mythical characters are clearly indicative of a meaningful purpose. Secrecy and sharing serve as catalytic devices to reveal the wondrous, magical aspect of the divyakatha (literally, 1 divine tales 1 as the narration is subsequently referred to), the curse i.s used as a means to introduce the tale within a tale, and deliverance from the curse as a return to the point of take off, which set in motion a variety of temporal movements. The distinction of the physical world of the mortals from the devas' demarcate the worlds of tangible reality and the region of the fabulous. Comparable with divyamanushches t ha (concerning the affairs of the divinity and humankind) the narrative form combines the magic of 5 an alaukika experience without losing its contact with 'reality'. The choice of the Vidyadharas becomes a n appropriate metaphor for an interminate traversal of time­ space zones. The co-existence of the historical and fictional characters reflects similar preoccupation with a back ~ and -forth in time, whereas the choice of Shi.va as archetypal narrator and the all-knowing female energy represented by Parvati as audience evoke some imponderable queries. The complexity of the Vedic Rudra and of the non- Aryan, animistic 'Lord of the Animals' coalescing in the .. 5 .. image of Shiva is intoned in the transmission of tales back and forth from the holy to the lowly of tongues (or from the oral to the written traditions); emblematically even, as in. the ji.va of a Brahmana encased in the body of a Shudra. It also indicates inherent tensions and conflicts in their relationships. The starving birds and beasts who 'heard' the tales lost to humanity hint at dimensions or frequencies alien to human sensibilj.ties. Perhaps it wo11ld appear that the point is being stretched too far, that too much is read into a mere introduction. Subsequent tales of the Kathasaritsagar bear out that it is not really so. In fact the stories would not even make much sense if one did not make these and other ostensibly 'irrational' connections. An oblique but inherent system of suggestion interconnects the seemingly disjointed tales and themes which forms an integral part of the structural scheme of the Kathasaritsagar. It is difficult indeed to disconnect tales as each one sprouts organically from the other giving clues for still others to extend the back and forth arterial rhythms. For instance, the story of a past life running parallel to a 'timeless' parable intervenes into a tale of · prophecy gradually unfolding into the present Improvisation being central to the process of .. 6 .. stringing together tales ) diverse means ranging from impromptu conjurings to pre- planned structures are employed to cut across lines demarcating the rational from the irrational. So the tales circulate ~ run in concentric or spirally looping movements to make connections or re- connections or zigzag and even zoom out. Some serve as cover~ing layers ~ flesh, skin or shell , in and around the complex stories for the peeling or gradual uncovering of 6 the core and the savouring of nectar (rasasvada). In the process of reading (of Kathasaritsagar) what at first appeared to be a mere 'boxed in' format, turns into a maze, a honeycomb and more. The entry into the hidden recesses and shared open spaces that combine magical secrecy as well as a linear through-and-through visiblity, something like entering a step-well, is a little different from the progressive .laying open of the 'boxes'. Often to retrieve the original tale after five or seven layers of tales - each like a life lived after PhrYatti's ~ curse 7 is both dizzying and exhilarating. What transpires in the process of continuance of a story within a story, is a gestalt of alternation. A character of the opening story assumes the role of the · narrator in the next. The improvisatory nature of narration awakens in the reader a latent narrator to conjure and construe •• 7 •• similar tales. Such transpositions of the roles of the narrated character, narrator and audience - not unlike the chain of transmittance of the mahakatha from Somadeva to Shiva, gana, pishacha and Gunadhya right down to the present reader brings in the narrative form an openness which cuts across the inside and the outside bf the tales and transcends the barriers of 'artiste' and 'novice'. In the end the narrative form spills out over a priori constraints of professional skills and styles. What ~ould be a free for all in the appropriation of form gets its acid test from the response of the audience. What counts here is the quality of improvisation and an identification with the magical substance of transformation, like the spirit of Duende that Lorca 7 speaks about or a veritable parakayapravesh of the narrator into his characters. The implications are that such improvisatory growth of narration may obliterate or transform the source in the process, like branches growing into roots and covering the original trunk of a banyan tree. The multiple traditions • pf the Ramayana both in and outside the country exemplify the range and quality of such transformation. The monogamous character of Rama becomes polygamous in the 8 Jaina or the Malay versions of the Ramayana. It is also .. 8 .. not unlikely that in cases of transfiguration the hero and the adversary might switch roles. The possibility that even tales of the Ramayana and the t'1ahabharata - not to speak of less august secular prototypes - were subject to interpretation, brought in social, · regional and personal dynamics. The vast regional tradition of Kathakars and Bhopas-bardic narrators-still operative in the hinterland of India shows that the extent and nature of transforma­ tion was neither innocent nor limited to stylistic features alone.