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Books By Meena Arora Nayak

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Evil in the Mahabharata 19 Jan, 2018

by Meena Arora Nayak

( 2 )

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Good and evil, loyalty and treachery, faith and doubt, honour and ignominy—the Mahabharata has served as a primer for codes of conduct to generations of Hindus. Over time, the epic has also fascinated those who love a tale well told. In its telling, however, the story has lost much of its richness and nuance, and the characters have become one-dimensional cut-outs—either starkly good or irredeemably evil. In this reinterpretation, Meena Arora Nayak analyses how the values espoused in the Mahabharata came to be distorted into meagre archetypes, creating customary laws that injure society even today.

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The Blue Lotus: Myths and Folktales of India 26 Sep, 2018

by Meena Arora Nayak

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Here you will find gods who make the three worlds tremble and lightning swing wildly across the firmament, shape-shifting asuras living in enchanted forests, wandering rishis with formidable magical powers, bewitching apsaras gliding through heavenly palaces and heroes so tall they touch the skies.
Myths and folktales have nourished the cultural and spiritual heritage of India since the dawn of creation. They not only accentuate the splendour of the country’s diverse cultures—Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, Christian, Sikh, Parsi, and tribal—but, collectively, they also blend to shape our nation’s psyche. Many of them are familiar to us from our own childhoods. Those that are new serve to remind us of the extraordinary complexity of India’s storytelling tradition. Sometimes these tales are archetypal, and sometimes they defy categorization. Sometimes they affirm our core values and, at other times, they make us question the motives that drive us. But what is always true about them, no matter how fantastical or creative the forms they take, is the rare insight they give us into the lives we live. They teach us about kinship, desire, greed, conflict, friendship, treachery, compassion, arrogance, persecution, empowerment, secrecy, romance, suffering, courage, challenges, wisdom, sexuality, and spirituality—and innumerable other things we might expect to experience in the course of our journey through life.
Through her masterful retelling, Meena Arora Nayak brings to vivid life familiar and beloved stories from the Vedas, Puranas, the great epics, Kathasaritsagara and the Panchatantra, as well as lesser-known offerings from the Jatakas, Bible, Holy Quran, Sikh Janamsakhis, and the folk traditions of the Santhals, Khasis, Oriyas, Bengalis and Punjabis, among others. Perhaps the most comprehensive collection of Indian myths and folktales to have been published in our time, the tales in The Blue Lotus will leave readers of all ages spellbound.

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THE KATHASARITASAGARA OF SOMADEVA 10 Dec, 2020

by Meena Arora Nayak

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One of India’s greatest epics, The Kathasaritsagara is thought to have been compiled
around 1070 CE by Somadeva Bhatt, during the reign of Raja Ananta of the Lohara
dynasty of Kashmir. Even though this extraordinary work is one of the longest creations
in Indian and world literature, it is considered to be only a small part of an even
longer work called Brihatkatha, composed by Gunadhya in a lost language known as
Paisachi. Somadeva collected and retold the stories of The Kathasaritsagara in Sanskrit
to entertain Raja Ananta’s wife, Suryavati. This masterpiece is foundational for many
of India’s best-loved folk tale traditions, such as Vetala Pachisi and Panchatantra, and
it has influenced many of the world’s best-known classics, including One Thousand
and One Nights, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales. In addition, contemporary
writers like Salman Rushdie have drawn from the work in books like Haroun and
the Sea of Stories.
Within its vast frame, The Kathasaritsagara has several hundred stories that owe their
origin to India’s limitless storehouse of myth, scripture, and folklore. Snake gods
rub shoulders with enchanted princesses, and heroic warrior-kings battle rakshasas
tall as the sky and wide as the ocean. Celestial apsaras seduce handsome princes,
wise prostitutes counsel errant husbands, fools parley with ghouls, and riddlers
and talking monkeys pace through the tales. Here you will find talking birds and
swindlers, beggars and conjurers, sages and polymaths, divine beings and semidivine
vidyadharas, yakshas and yoginis, walking corpses and sleeping giants, and
a host of other remarkable creatures mingling with ordinary men and women in
a multitude of magical kingdoms, enchanted islands, and forbidding forests in the
three worlds—heaven, earth, and the netherworld. And through this skein of stories
contained in eighteen books, Somadeva spins tales of love, infidelity, death, rebirth,
sacrifice, fulfilment, courage, cowardliness, honesty, untruth, separation, togetherness,
joy, sadness, and much, much more.
The central story of this epic revolves around the son of the famed Raja Udayana,
Naravahanadatta, and his marital quests, in the course of which he acquires
numerous wives, encounters a host of memorable characters, and wins supremacy
over the mystical vidyadharas. Meena Arora Nayak’s brilliant new retelling of The
Kathasaritsagara, the first major rendition of the epic in a quarter century, closely
follows the adventures of Naravahanadatta and brings these ancient tales to new
and enthralling life.

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