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Young doe-eyed maidens cast bewitching glances in the moonlight. Birds frolic, flowers bloom in a riotous kaleidoscope and the shifting seasons bear witness to the amorous games of lovers. And through this boisterous celebration of beauty and bounty, timeless wisdom is dispensed through brief, colourful vignettes. In Three Hundred Verses, Bhartrihari, one of the greatest Sanskrit poets of all time, brilliantly expounds on our most enduring concerns and dilemmas: ...
This is the story of Madhavanala and Kamakandala. Madhav, a handsome and accomplished young man, is asked to leave his city of Pushpavati: has looks and singing so distract women that they neglect their work, and city folk are in uproar about it. Exiled, Madhav reaches the court of King Kama Sena, the ruler of Kamavati, where he meets the bewitching courtesan Kama. The two fall in love, but royal ire ensures that the lovers must part. A heartbroken Madhav takes ...
The god Shiva is utterly seduced by Mohini, the enchanting female form assumed by the god Vishnu during the churning of the ocean for nectar. A barber employs wit and wile and rumours of witchcraft to win his wife back from the lustful attentions of their king. The celestial nymph Urvashi curses the Pandava prince Arjuna when he rejects her sexual advances. A woman caught in adultery befools her elders with a religious ritual. A man with a disagreeable missing ...
This is a comprehensive anthology of Sanskrit poetry in the best English translations available. The first ever of its kind, it brings together excerpts from a full range of original works, translated by over forty distinguished writers including poets and scholars, savants and seers, and two winners of the Nobel Prize for literature. Sanskrit, with an unbroken literary tradition of at least three thousand years, is a major component of India’s cultural ...
The Panchatantra is one of the best known classics of ancient India. Composed in Sanskrit over 1600 years ago, its satirical stories of human foibles in animal grab soon went round the world, being rendered into middle persian around the 6th, into Arabic around the 8th, and into European languages by the 15th century AD. These entirely secular tales of wit, virtue, and wickedness, have retained their freshness and timeless appeal through numerous translations ...
These famous stories narrated by the thirty two statuettes of nymphs supporting the magic throne of Vikramaditya extol his courage, compassion and extraordinary magnanimity. The original author of the Simhasana Dvatrimsika is unknown. The present text is dated to the thirteenth century AD. It exists in four main recessions, from which extracts have been compiled together for the first time, in this lively and faithful translation of this celebrated classic by a ...
The Jatakamala is a famous work in both Buddhist and Sanskrit literature. It recounts thirty-four stories of the Buddha’s previous births, and his virtuous deeds in those incarnations-as a god, man or animal. Written by Arya Shura in the fourth century AD in elegant Sanskrit prose and verse, these tales were later translated into Chinese and Tibetan. Some of these tales are depicted in the Ajanta cave paintings. Their colourful backgrounds range from a ...