This talk was delivered at the annual conference 'On History and Literature' held in Calcutta in July 2025.
I came to history through stories. My father gave me a copy of Kamala Subramaniam’s retelling of the Mahabharata, published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, its cover dyed saffron, with a picture of Vyasa dictating the great epic to Ganesha. I remember my seven-year-old-self, sitting on the terrace in the winter sun, having carted up a dhurrie and a plate of oranges, weeping copiously over the death of Karna. I read that copy several times over the next few years, until its binding collapsed, but it still follows me from house to house, even though the dust jacket fell off somewhere and the bright saffron of the cover has faded.
In the 1980s, the old stories were still in circulation: Chandamama and Tinkle shared space on our shelves, the ideological moorings of Amar Chitra Katha were obscure and Alif Laila, Vikram Betaal and the Mahabharat were all being aired on Doordarshan. As liberalization entered in waves, they got swept away. My sisters hardly know these stories and for my children they are an antique land.
But for me, these stories constituted my imagination of the past, even if they were fragments that did not add up to a whole. A decade later, when I joined college, I realized these were refracted images, not easily studied as sources of history. In the degrees that I accumulated as a history student, I renounced them, choosing to stick to straightforward political economy. It was only much later that I understood not only that I continued to be captivated by them but also that there were so many stories jostling for space in the precincts of early Indian history.
The last two decades have seen a literary turn in the study of the premodern past. Much work has been done on texts and ideas, circuits of transmission and circulation, literary and intellectual worlds1. But in entering this conversation on literature and history, I decided I wanted to talk not about text and context but about stories in the purest sense, as creative productions––not as something that happened or which people remember––but as something improbable, invented, bringing joy or wonder. And so, to begin this conversation about literature and history, let me tell you a story, told and retold over time and ask what sense we can make of it.
THE TALE IN CONTEXT
The story I want to tell you is well known as ‘The Tale of the Transposed Heads.’ It occurs first in the Vetalapanchavimshati or the ‘Twenty-Five Tales of the Vetala’. As some of you might know, the stories of the Vetalapanchavimshati are embedded within the encounters of King Vikramaditya and the vetala. These begin with a tantric approaching the legendary King Vikramaditya with a series of gifts. When asked what he wants in return, the ascetic requests the king to bring him the vetala hanging from a tree, deep within the cremation grounds. The king sets out on this quest but when he picks up the vetala, the latter states that he must answer the riddles posed to him. If, despite knowing the answer, the king does not speak, his head will shatter into a hundred pieces. If he does answer correctly, however, he has broken his vow of silence and the vetala will return to dangling from the tree. Night after night, the vetala poses his riddles and for twenty-four nights the king answers him successfully and so, the cycle begins again.
The stories of the Vetalapanchavimshati have been classed as part of ‘the narrative tradition of the riddle-tale.’2 They participate in a tradition of ‘emboxment’, the structural device of a story-within-a-story that occurs in Indian texts from a very early period. Some scholars argue that this frame is a particularly Indian trait that spread through works such as the Panchatantra and went on to inform other storytelling traditions like the Arabian Nights. For our purposes, however, what I wish to emphasize is that both the story within and the story without are of interest.
The vetala is a sinister figure, often translated as ‘genie’, ‘ghoul’, ‘demon’ or ‘animate corpse’. I will stick to vetala since it seems to be the case that they represented a class of supernatural beings both worshipped and feared. In the world of Sanskrit literature, the vetala is a fearsome being.
Heads roll frequently in the Vetalapanchavimshati. They are displaceable, detachable, replaceable, transferable. It goes without saying that this is a kingdom of the imagination and not of flesh-and-blood. Within this larger collection, the story I am going to tell you is the sixth story in the vulgate compendium and it is told to Vikrama by the vetala as a story of olden times (pura), a story of times long past.3
A long time ago, the vetala begins, there was a ruler named Yashahketu and in his capital Shobhavati stood a temple to Gauri. To the south of the temple was a lake called Gauri-tirtha and each year in the month of Ashadha, people would come from all directions to bathe at the spot. On one such occasion, a washerman named Dhavala came to the site and while taking a ritual bath, laid eyes upon Madanasundari, the daughter of the royal washerman Shuddhapata. Struck by her beauty, he falls sick with the fever of love and returning home, like all good lovers, refuses food and drink. Seeing his predicament, his mother informs her husband, who hastens to his son’s bedside and tells him not to fear: ‘We are well off in family, wealth and work; I know [Shuddhapata] and he knows me; hence, this is not a difficult task.’
Soon after, the marriage is contracted and Dhavala brings home his beautiful bride. After some time has passed, Madanasundari’s brother comes to visit them and invites them to a puja at her maternal home. The three of them set out and stop, enroute, at the temple to Gauri. Dhavala enters the temple first: inside the sanctum, suddenly consumed by religious ecstasy, he decides to sacrifice his head to the goddess. In the room beside the sanctum, he finds a sword to perform the deed.
When some time passes and Dhavala does not return, Madanasundari’s brother goes in to find out what is wrong. Consumed by grief at the sight that meets him, he also sacrifices himself to the goddess. When he too does not return, Madanasundari enters the shrine, finds the bodies of the two men she loves most and weeps in despair and mourning. Addressing the goddess, she cries, ‘At one instant, how have you killed my husband and brother? This is not appropriate. I, who have been your relentless devotee, now when I fall at your feet, listen to my piteous words. I am going to leave this unfortunate body here. O Devi! Wherever and whenever I am born again, let these two be my brother and husband!’ Saying this, she prepares to hang herself from the Ashoka tree in the yard. Before she can do so, however, a voice rings out from the heavens, saying ‘I am pleased with your courage. Fix the heads and bodies of your husband and brother together and I will bring them back to life.’
Crazed by happiness, Madanasundari runs to put them back together, but in her haste, she attaches Dhavala’s head to her brother’s body and her brother’s head to Dhavala’s body and they both come back to life, as if waking from a deep sleep. The tale comes to an end and the vetala asks, ‘Of these two transposed bodies, which one should be her lord?’ Vikramaditya replies, ‘The body that is attached to her husband’s head is her husband, since the head is the first among all the bodily organs.’ At this, the vetala leaves his shoulders and returns to the cremation ground.
This is, I will admit, a weird story, more terrible than enjoyable. Where did such a gory tale originate? We cannot be sure. Did it originate in a bawdy folk register that asked, what defines a man––his head or his instrument? Did it begin among groups of women sitting together, asking what happens if you have a husband but desire another? Was it an attempt to make sense of a human predicament when faced with a terrible situation? Or was it simply a hypothetical situation aimed at determining dharma?
We can work out these various permutations and combinations but the contexts of production and reception of the original stories are lost. The original version of the story, at the moment of its first utterance, is also lost to time. What can a historian do in this case?
We can listen to the story but also seek to root it, trying to find the soil from which it emerged. Although it draws on tropes of religious ecstasy and devotion, this is not a religious tale. At best, it tells us something about the nature of goddess traditions in the early medieval period––the fact that Gauri stands alone in a large temple dedicated to her is interesting and sacrificing one’s head (or an opponent’s head) to the goddess is a practice upheld in various accounts.4
There are other resonances: although flawed, Madanasundari is a pativrata and, as in the story of Savitri and Satyavan, is able, through her powers, to bring her husband back to life. The guiding metaphor of the story, the point around which the riddle crystallizes, is the question of overlordship and from its earliest occurrence in the later Vedic texts, the term ‘pati’––which we continue to use today––has the sense of the husband being the lord and master of his wife. In the end, however, this is only one source and a historian needs several sources to make an argument.
In its vulgate version, the tale of transposed heads is a story that leaves us with a sense of uncertainty. It asks, how do we make sense of a rupture, of a new and changed world? When the story ends, this is Madanasundari’s dilemma. The two men seem happy enough to be restored to life.
A SERIES OF RETELLINGS
It is worth reminding ourselves that readers and listeners of this tale did not take it literally. Rather, such a story would have been classed as a katha––born of the imagination (kalpana) and representing ‘a state of affairs having no correspondence with reality.’5 Listening to a story was meant to confer upon the audience a sense of the wondrous (adbhuta, vicitra) and there was the pure pleasure to the act of listening to a story. For this reason, I would argue, that it is important to take the story-ness of the story seriously, as a tale told to pass the time.
Something about this tale captured people’s imaginations, which is why it recurs in story compendia throughout the medieval period. There are four major Sanskrit versions of the text––by Kshemendra, Somadeva, Shivadasa and Jambhaladatta––and they date from the early to mid-second millennium CE. But the tale is not confined to the Sanskrit katha tradition and in each telling, the shape and form of the narrative changes, the riddle is asked afresh and the tale is told anew.
The Jainas were among the great storytellers of the medieval period, so it is not surprising that a variant of this tale occurs in the Katharatnakara of Hemavijaya (c.1565-1631), a Jaina monk from Gujarat.6 The setting of the story, though, is completely different. Once again, we meet King Vikramaditya, but this time we find him wandering in the royal gardens, where he encounters a duta (a messenger-cum-spy) with worn clothes and broken shoes who has just returned from a distant land. ‘What wonders have you seen?’, the king asks and the messenger replies that in the city of Kanakasara, there lives a beautiful princess called Tilakashri who has vowed she will only marry the man who gets her to speak four times in a night.
Hearing of princess Tilakashri’s vow of silence, the duta tells Vikramaditya: ‘Many sons of kings, ministers, merchants, caravan leaders and generals came for that purpose and, unable to conquer her, they remain at her house. With shaved heads, dirty mouths and fettered feet, wearing women’s clothes and ornaments, they carry water every day.’ The king is moved by the plight of these hapless men and vows to remove their sorrows and destroy the princess’s pride. Dismissing the duta, he readies himself to go to Kanakasarapura, accompanied only by his man-servant and the vetala. The vetala here is not the fearsome creature of the cremation grounds but appears quite domestic, a loyal sidekick of the king. Similarly, it is not king Vikrama who has to be made to talk here but the princess who must be cajoled to speak.
Appearing in Kanakasarapura in the guise of a yogi, Vikramaditya knocks at the palace gate and declares his intentions. At night, he enters the princess’s bed-chambers and ignoring her silent and obdurate presence, addresses the lamp glowing in the room: ‘O lamp! This woman is harder than stone and does not even say “hun” in response. Only if you give a hunkara shall I start to tell a story.’ The vetala, sitting inside the lamp, replies in the affirmative and so the king begins his tale:
In the village of Kalasara, a Brahmin named Narayana went to his father-in-law’s house seven times to bring back his wife Kamala, but she did not come for some reason. Then, as he went to bring her back the eighth time, accompanied by his friend Keshava, the road brought them to the tirtha named Mrityunjaya and in front of [the idol of Maheshvara, he declared a vow: “O God! If I come back with my beloved this time, I will perform a lotus flower puja for you.”
This time, his trip is successful, and returning with his wife and her retinue, Narayana stops at the temple and says to his friend, “I will bow down to Mahadeva and return. Until then, you must remain here.” Having gone inside, he worshipped Maheshvara with a lotus of his own head, severed with a sword.
Puzzled by his friend’s delay, Keshava enters the temple and, seeing his friend lying dead, kills himself, fearing the slander that he had sought to acquire his friend’s wife. When Keshava too does not return, the wife enters the temple and resolves to end her life but as she is about to cut off her own head, Shiva appears and takes the sword from her hand, saying, ‘I do not accept the sin of killing a woman.’
“[What is the use] of my life, tainted by slander and without a husband? Therefore, if you revive these two, then my life [will be spared], otherwise not.” Knowing her determination, the blessed Shambhu… said, “These two will live if they are sprinkled with water that has washed my [feet].” She, also with eagerness, attached the heads inversely and sprinkled them in the same way. Those two lived.
“O Lamp! For what reason are those two quarrelling with each other? Whose wife is
this?” When asked by the Yogin, the vetala residing within the lamp, eager to make the princess speak, uttered the incongruous words, “The wife of the face of the husband.” Overcome with anger and agitation, forgetting her own determination, [Tilakashri] said in a loud voice, “O sinful lamp! Do not lie!”
‘Indeed, at the time of the wedding, the right hand is given, but that is only with the trunk (kabandha),’ says the Yogin who is actually King Vikrama. Princess Tilakashri recognizes that she has spoken once and now only three opportunities remain.
What has changed from one telling to another? The frame story has changed. The names of the characters have changed. The motivation for the sacrifice has changed. The relationship between the three parties has changed. The intercession of the goddess has been replaced by the intervention of Shiva. And finally, the resolution of the story has changed.
Why does Hemavijaya change the resolution of the story? It is possible that in the original telling, the fact that the wife is asked to go with the head of the husband and the body of the brother was suggestive of incest, which must have made audiences uncomfortable. As a result, in subsequent tellings, we find the figure of brother replaced by a friend or unrelated character.
What is also interesting about this telling is that Hemavijaya is clearly drawing upon oral traditions of storytelling that were prevalent in western India. When Vikramaditya says that he can’t start his story without a hunkara, he draws from a tradition of storytelling which continues in the region till today. Unlike the distinctions we tend to make between folk and classical, oral and written, stories are often boundary-crossing entities. As they wander across the centuries, shifts and switches occur and their transmission does not necessarily involve formal, written pathways.
Further in the medieval period, the story occurs in Persian and Turkish versions of the Parrot-Book, the Tutinama.7 The Persian version of this text is said to date before the fourteenth century, so the Turkish version must date after that. The Turkish version, Friedrich Wilhelm tells us, has the story begin when an Indian prince passes a temple and sees a beautiful girl. He desires her and vows to sacrifice himself if she becomes his wife. The marriage comes to pass and sometime later, he visits the temple and remembers his promise. The man beheads himself and the brahmin priest of the temple who walks into the scene, also beheads himself, fearing that he will be accused of murder. When the wife enters the temple, she resolves to throw herself upon the sword, but at this moment, a voice is heard from the heavens telling her not to commit suicide and accept the true belief. She is promised that Allah will resuscitate both men if she accepts Islam and fixes the heads to the bodies. The woman agrees, but in her haste, transposes the heads. The men come to life and are only too happy to convert to Islam. The parrot ends the story by declaring that the man with the husband’s head is indeed her true lord.
It is worth pointing out that as this story moves and is adapted across the centuries, each retelling, each adaptation has a particular context. If the prohibition against suicide is important for the Islamic adaptation, the Rajasthani version, which we shall now come to, emphasizes the terrible consequences of not taking hospitality seriously. Each story
asks the question from its own time and place and the final decision is affected by the ethics of the society where the story is being told.
In the Rajasthani writer and folklorist Vijay Dan Detha’s famous Chouboli, the story occurs with the title ‘Dhani Kun?’ (‘Who is her Lord?’).8 Fascinatingly, the frame story is the same as the Katharatnakara – a princess who tests her suitors by refusing to speak, although in this instance she is named Chouboli (she who speaks four times). Detha’s version is gentler and more forgiving, for the narrator of the stories is not the ultra-masculine Vikramaditya (or, as some folk tellings would have it, Raja Bhoj), but a young woman dressed as a man. While the frame story has an element of fun, the story of the transposed heads is, in this instance, a story about caste. Let me read it to you in Christi Merrill and Kailash Kabir’s translation:
Once there was a village where a Rajput and a Jat lived. They were the best of friends. They spent every moment of the day and every moment of the night as close to each other as shadows. They worked in the field together, grazed their cattle together, ate their roti-bati together. The two had their houses built next to each other on adjoining plots. The love they had for each other was deeper than that of brothers.
When the Rajput went with the Jat for his mukhlavau to retrieve his bride from her parents’ home, his friend’s in-laws treated him better than their own son-in-law… After a few days it was time to set out for the Rajput’s mukhlavau…
The whole journey the Rajput couldn’t stop wondering how his in-laws would treat his friend. It would be horrible if they were to slight him in any way. When they drew close to the temple, he stopped the carriage. The Rajput was a devotee of Guileless Mahadev. [He]… stood before the image of Shankar Bhagwan with folded hands and prayed that his in-laws would attend to his friend with the same care and concern as they would to him. He pledged an eleven-rupee offering that everything might turn out just as he hoped. But he vowed that if there was any discrimination, he would come back to take his life at that very spot…9
As fate would have it, the Rajput’s in-laws treated the Jat like a servant and discriminated against him in every way. Furious at their behaviour, the Rajput took his leave as soon as possible and, on his way back, stopped the carriage in front of Shiva’s temple and silently entered the sanctum:
He stood in front of the image of Guileless Shankar and pulled the sword out of its scabbard with a swoosh. He said: “If you didn’t trouble to look after my honour, then why should I bother to look after yours? I nursed at the bosom of a Rajputani, so I am not about to forsake my vow.” And without stopping to ponder his resolution, he drew his sword across his neck.10
His friend follows after him and dead, their blood begins to mingle. ‘They began to dissolve into one another’. When the bride enters the temple, horrified, she prepares to follow in their wake, but this time it is Parvati who stops her, saying, ‘Please forgive Guileless Mahadev, my daughter; he was too high on dhatura to know what was going on. Just put their heads back on their trunks and they will come back to life in the blink of an eye.’
Things proceed as before and the frame story concludes with the woman-dressed-as-man asking, ‘Tell me, which one is the bride’s true lord?’ The wind, blowing out the lamp replies, ‘The trunk is twenty-times bigger than the head. Which is why the one with the trunk of the Rajput and the head of the Jat should be her lord.’ An infuriated Chouboli rises to the bait: ‘Men recognize one another by their faces,’ she says, ‘The one with the face and head of the Rajput is the one who is her true lord.’
Across a thousand years as this story is retold, what you can see, at the very least, is that no one ever has complete ownership of it. These are not just narratives of continuity, but also in some instances, acts of subversion. Perhaps the most subversive retelling is that offered by Girish Karnad: many of you sitting in the audience would know that his Hayavadana represents a reworking of this particular tale. But Karnad converts a tale of wonder into a tragi-comic mélange, a body-mind paradox where he tries to imagine what would have happened once the men come back to life,11 and at the end of traversing a millennium of retellings, I found this to be my least favourite rendition of the tale.
THE HISTORIAN AND THE STORYTELLER
The story of the transposed heads has been told and retold over time and, in this talk, I have tried to give you a genealogy of the tale. In constructing my narrative, I have made choices, for it was not possible to put together every instance of telling and retelling. These four versions are joined together by my juxtaposition, my choice of them. Other versions, other variants exist and continue to circulate and, in the hands of each storyteller, the tale turns differently. Each time this story is told, it is told anew, because it draws from the time and place of its telling. Precisely the same exercise could be done for other stories from the ancient past––the Vessantara Jataka, the story of Shakuntala, the Ramayana––and each time, the results will be different because the stories are different.12
If studying the part can illuminate the whole, then this one tale should be enough to tell us that in South Asia, we inherit a culture of stories. The metaphor of the Kathasaritsagara and the Katharatnakara holds true: folk and classical, Muslim and Jaina, Sanskrit and Prakrit, Kannada and Persian, all mix and merge in the ocean of stories. Such stories are not lost: they continue amongst us, as our contemporaries. Far from being imprisoned within texts or their times, they have a lightness that allows them to break free.
As historians, we need to remember that stories have a life outside of the texts in which we find them. But still, it is worth asking, why do some stories breed retelling while others do not? What is it that strikes? A metaphor, an identification with the main characters? Is it the same story that is being told across the centuries or are the differences original? Stories beget more stories even as histories beget more histories. But even if such stories allow us to think of the past in terms of fluidity rather than the dead weight of tradition, it is worth pointing out that in many instances, these are not just tales of wonder but also stories of deep inequality. This is why, for historians, there is no such thing as a ‘timeless story’. We have to honour the evidence, if we seek to deepen our craft.
Historians and storytellers are fellow travelers in the world of narrative. But the narratives we construct are different, their constraints are different. Newness is important for a storyteller; context is important for a historian. A storyteller seeks to fill in gaps and silences, whereas a historian asks questions of them. In its own way, the Tale of Transposed Heads serves, for me, as a metaphor for the predicament of the historian and the storyteller. We think of ourselves as separate and distinct, but an accident can cause a switch to occur. In that case, we are forced to ask: Who do we want to be? Which of us is better?
As historians and storytellers, we are joined in a shared hope for our audiences––that we will be loved, that our narratives will continue to have meaning, that the wellspring of stories will not run dry. Our deepest desire is that the stories we tell, the accounts we put together, will matter to some of you as much as they matter to us. Philip Larkin famously said ‘What will survive of us is love.’ If I may say so, what will survive us are our stories.
QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION
Audience Member 1: I’d like to thank the speaker for her excellent presentation. My question is, should we use stories as a point of entry for teaching history, especially in the context of classroom teaching? And is there any danger of facts getting mixed with fiction, if we do so?
Meera Visvanathan: I love pedagogy questions. Of course, stories should be used as a point of entry. That’s what I was doing. But as a historian, you always have to teach people to read a story historically. It is something that has to be taught and involves questions of evidence, authorship, context and translation. For example, you can’t take a story like the ‘Tale of Transposed Heads’ and say that it describes the world in the early medieval period. Often, people take such stories as descriptions of the past which is a problem, but there is no point in being supercilious about this because it shows that these stories have great power. Those of you who grew up in the 1980s will remember Chandamama––I remember reading Chandamama on train journeys––or that Vikram-Betaal adaptation where that vetala was horrendous, I was scared of it. Those stories of my childhood have stayed with me longer than many sober historical accounts.
But the crisis we are facing as historians in India is precisely this, that we seem to have become a nation that takes stories literally. And taking a story literally is to rid it of its power, because the story is often telling you some other kind of truth.
Audience Member 2: Thank you, ma’am, for your excellent presentation. I have studied the Panchatantra very deeply. I’m very fascinated by that compendium of stories. I’m curious about the kind of structure that is used in Panchatantra. And as you said, emboxment––the use of frame stories––is something that you find in other compendiums as well. Have you come across any literature or any kind of explanation to why some structure like this was preferred? And what did it do to enhance or carry the story forward in its oral form?
MV: On the topic of emboxment there is a thesis by the Finnish scholar V. Hämeen-Anttila where she traces the history of this story tradition.13 And, as is common in a lot of Indological work, she takes it back to the Vedic texts. There’s also an article by Michael Witzel where he does something similar.14
When you think of the structure of a text like the Mahabharata, there is the story of the sacrifice within which other stories are embedded; even during the exploits and wanderings of the Pandavas, they will meet someone like Markandeya and he will tell them the story of Savitri and Satyavan and so on. So, this is something that is fairly common from very early times. As historians, we often get these stories from texts that were written down but we know that long processes of oral transmission and circulation were also involved. The orality of the story is always hiding somewhere.
I think another way of thinking about these stories is through forms of attention. I remember reading this interview by Javed Akhtar, where he says that in Lucknow, there was this great culture of storytelling and he tells a story of an insomniac Nawab who used to pass his nights with his storyteller.15 Once, it so happens that the storyteller has to proceed on the Hajj. So, he calls his shagird (student) and says, ‘I have been telling the Nawab a story about a king and at the point where I left the story, the king is supposed to head out from the castle and go hunting.’ So, the shagird says, ‘Master, don’t worry. I will continue the story.’ The storyteller goes off on the Hajj and, when he returns, he meets the shagird and asks, ‘Where is the story? What has happened so far?’ And the shagird says, ‘Master, so long as you are alive in the world, why do I have to bring the king out of the palace? He’s still in the palace.’
What I am trying to say is that we also need to reach out to that experience of listening to a story. And because we no longer live in such cultures of listening, we find those structures, those forms of attention difficult to comprehend, but they’re not that far away.
Sudipta Sen: I was wondering about another dimension to your story, which to me is very fascinating, noting how the figure of the vetala changes with these tellings. There is, first of all, the invocation of tantra at that particular time. As you know, the vetalas have usually been invoked in the tantra literature for malicious purposes or the exercise of power. But this seems to be a creature which sort of straddles nature and the human world in the cremation ground. And then, there’s the vetala residing inside a light or a lamp. And then, I believe in the last telling, once it’s transported to the Persianate world, it seems like the vetala figure sort of disappears or maybe it’s there and I didn’t quite catch it.
So, I was wondering if there’s a genealogy of this creature or this presence, which is sort of outside the frame of divine providence and intrudes upon a world of humans. And I think to me, it invokes older stories about yakshas and other animistic figures that are always sort of hovering at the margins. So, I just wanted to see if you had some thoughts about that.
MV: Thank you. In recent times, there has been a growing body of literature on the vetala. There is a very learned article, which I didn’t read because I was short on time, by the Hungarian scholar Csaba Dezső.16 Then D. D. Kosambi has a section in An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, where he talks about the vetala.17 Kosambi, of course, comes from Goa, on the west coast, where you still have shrines to vetalas. So, it’s very much part of that process of the incorporation of folk traditions or whatever we want to call them, into the mainstream of Hinduism. But the incorporation of the vetala also varies. In certain instances, as you can see, it is this fearsome character in the cremation grounds. In other instances, the vetala is a deity in his own right.
In Jaina storytelling, particularly medieval Jaina storytelling, there is a note of disdain towards Hindu traditions as well. One of the things that I find interesting about Hemavijaya’s story is the fact that the two figures are called Keshava and Narayana. The Jainas are using stories and tropes from the Hindu tradition but subverting them. And those subversions are extremely important for historians because they feed into the issue of the interaction between religious traditions. When we look at the early medieval and medieval periods, this question of the interrelationships between different religions is hugely interesting.
I don’t know anything about the Persian or the Turkish materials. I took the detail from an article by a scholar called Friedrich Wilhelm, which was published in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Institute. I don’t have the competence to check that original source and I don’t have an understanding of its particular history.
Amit Jha: You started your account with some stories and you said we have all read those stories when we were children. And later you took the story across time and across cultures and brought it to the modern age. I had a feeling, that when you said that we have all read those stories, you are actually drawing ‘us’ into a very closed group, as though we are as a class category or that we are bound by certain common conventions of being bhadralok or being literate such that we all read the same stories when we were young, whether it is Chandamama or Vikram and Vetala. So, to that extent, your appeal, I think, is narrowed to a small group of elites, which reads the same stories and draws conclusions from them, grows up on them.
Similarly, the stories themselves deal with royalty and women of royalty, rajkumaris and kings and Vikramaditya and vetala, they traverse a narrow social milieu. When you start reducing them to context across centuries, you realize that all these stories have a narrow base and I would request you to widen the kind of stories that you are interpreting or reading. I am sure you are doing that. Otherwise, the stories in themselves––if we give too much relevance to them––will become another reality, which is actually a very small part of what was actually happening in that setting.
MV: Well, Mr. Jha, there is a strategy called ‘reading against the grain’, which is that the text that you have is from a particular elite milieu but you read it recognizing that and also try to analyse the social structures it relates to. As I said, these are often stories of hierarchy and deep inequality. If I were a storyteller, I would retell these stories, as other storytellers have, but as a historian, I am constrained by my sources.
That being said, I am also sympathetic to your concerns. One of the issues my own research work delves into is how one thinks about anti-caste traditions in the long term. I also know that there is a whole range of texts and traditions in the precincts of early Indian history. And I think my job as a historian is really to say that there is this diversity to the tradition. Otherwise, honestly, in left-liberal circles, the ancient past becomes the Mahabharata, the Manusmriti and the Bhagavad Gita. There is more and we should not reduce traditions to slogans on either side. I love these stories and I’m sure there are other people who love these stories and we often seek a community like us. But that does not stop other people from finding other stories or telling other stories, or starting anew. That freedom is there for all of us. One of the reasons I have been enjoying the katha tradition of late is because it crosses a lot of these boundaries of elite and ‘folk’. The Sanskritist Adheesh Sathaye has been doing some very nice work on the Vetala Panchavimshati, where he shows that even when they are written down, these are very fluid texts. The scribe is changing the moral as he likes––he finds some verse circulating, he throws it into the text.18 These are worlds that are fluid, bubbling and contestatory. They are not just worlds of deep hierarchy.
Durya Damle: So, within the Vetala Panchavimshati, the vetala has a transformation towards the end, right? Initially in the twenty-five stories, we fear the vetala and in the end, there is a surprise––the vetala is actually the good person and the tantric who has set off Vikram on the trail is the bad one. So, there is an element of surprise and just interpreting the vetala as an evil character, even within Vetala Panchavimshati, is not right because there is a transformation towards the end. It is more about an element of surprise rather than painting characters in grey rather than black and white even within the same text.
MV: I’m completely in agreement with you. But at the same time, do you want to think in terms of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’? The vetala is also not the hero of the story, right? That position is there for Vikram. But you’re completely right that at the end of the collection, the Tantric turns out to be Vikram’s half-brother who has evil intentions and the Tantric’s head rolls! As I said, heads keep on rolling in the story. But who is right and who is wrong? There are all these switches. If you look at the structure of those riddle tales, there’s always a dyad: Is it this or is it that? Is this right or is this wrong? So, I mean, that structure is definitely worthy of attention, if one were doing a measured scholarly study of the text.
But in my presentation today, it was the tale that was the hero rather than the text. This meant that I emphasized the story at the cost of the text it was located in. However, if I was talking or writing about the text as a whole, then obviously, there are other tropes, other themes that I would bring in.
Audience Member 6: To what extent should we use story as a source of value system or societal attitude or treat it purely as a figment of imagination?
MV: One of the things I have thought about as a historian is that when you encounter these stories they’re often presented as having a moral. When a child reads the stories of the Panchatantra, they’re always told with a moral. These stories aren’t necessarily thought of as otherwise. But because the Panchatantra was a nitishastra, it contains within it a body of knowledge about politics that is not necessarily moral or ethical. My concern particularly with the push to ‘Indian Knowledge Systems’ is that we often extract only certain things that we deem to be good and appropriate. But the texts have much more.
Sanjana: You mentioned that as a nation, we take stories literally. As an educator, when we step into the classroom, how do we draw that line or that boundary where we are able to make the students understand what is fact, what is fiction, especially with the shifting narratives in the changing curriculum. How do we provide the tools to the students so that they’re able to understand what is a historical fact, what is a story etc.?
MV: So, I think the thing with the classroom is that you’re often thinking on your feet, because it’s not some abstract manifesto that you have to go and communicate to the students. If I have to explain to my students, ‘this is fact and this is fiction’, it is often in response to a question. So, someone will say to you, for instance, ‘In my family, this is our origin myth. This is the narrative of honour I’ve grown up with.’ (I teach undergraduate students.) And then the challenge for me is to say, ‘Well, B.D. Chattopadhyaya has this really learned article on the Rajputs and if you read it, you will never think of your community in the same way.’19
One of the things that as practitioners of history, we are confronted with in the classroom is that these pasts that surround us––to paraphrase Faulkner––they’re not even fully past. For many people, these worlds of caste or certain kinds of gender relations or of linguistic communities, are worlds that they continue to inhabit. And in some ways, I think that is also the enjoyment and strength of teaching history in this country. If I were not teaching here, I would have to go somewhere where I would have to say, ‘There was a king called Dasharatha, he had a son called Rama…’ I don’t have to tell that story here. People know it.
And for me, at least, I think one of the things that I try as a teacher is to get my students to talk to each other because often you will find that someone else holds another history within them, another way of viewing the same story. How do you make sense of that? So rather than saying that as a teacher I have to lay down the law, I think sometimes young people come to an understanding if you expose them to those possibilities. The issue is that often people are coming with certain fixed strictures of religion or caste or family. And the point of education is, of course, to understand that there are other worlds, there are other people. That works for me.
Omair Ahmad: I’m going to pick on Amit’s question earlier because I’m also from the generation of the Amar Chitra Katha and I had them bound and kept together. I want to tie it to something that Naveen was saying earlier. We had at that point of time, a state enterprise of an almost didactic form trying to include and talk about our stories together. And in that sense, we had a basis of storytelling and a kind of stage––I may be stretching the point––where we drew certain lessons that we as a country, as a people could talk about through shared stories, if not shared values, at least some kind of ethos. I am not trying to champion the good old days. But do you see a space or a way that we can do that now in today’s India?
MV: Well, we’re all the products of our times. I have a ten-year-old daughter with whom I’m watching Korean drama these days. Now, do I say, ‘Oh, Korean drama is very bad. I want you to watch the Mahabharat which was this great serial of the India I grew up in.’ She’s not interested. She’s going to say, ‘What are these special effects? They’re like something out of some other time.’
I do feel that the only way to keep stories going is to tell them anew. If we don’t, they become period pieces. As Amit Jha was pointing out and I completely agree, these stories are coming not just from worlds of syncretism but also of social hierarchy. So, do I want to just repeat an old story? I don’t. I would hope that people think of them anew. But I also wouldn’t say that in each instance this is some great patriarchal, hierarchical story. Vijay Dan Detha is a great storyteller precisely for that reason, that he took a story that was circulating––he says he got it from a Dalit bard called Saval Ram––and built upon it.
The frame story of Chouboli, Dan Detha’s story, is as follows: There is a thakur who gets up every morning and before breakfast shoots 108 arrows through his wife, the thakurani’s, nose ring. And of course, the poor thakurani is barely able to eat because she’s afraid every day is going to be her last. The thakur is so convinced that he is a great man and great archer that when taunted by a younger woman, he compels her to marry him and wants to shoot arrows through her nose ring as well. His younger wife dares him to prove his bravery by winning the hand of princess Chouboli. He sets out to win Chouboli, but in the presence of the beautiful princess, he falls silent and is eventually thrown into prison along with her other failed suitors. Then, his young wife dresses herself up as a man and presents herself as a suitor to the princess. This is there in Vijay Dan Detha’s story––it’s not there in any folk telling. In the stories she tells Chouboli, the Tale of Transposed Heads is the last story. And then, there’s this question, ‘Now Chouboli, whom do you belong to?’ Because actually she has been won by a woman dressed as a man, right? And they sort it out by pulling the thakur
out of prison and telling him, ‘You keep your mouth shut and ride on the white horse as a bridegroom. We will all live happily together and we will tell you how to govern your kingdom.’ I think that’s a great way of retelling that story.
We can do what we like with our stories. I don’t think we have to be in this mode that there is only a certain pristine way in which they have to be told. As a historian, however, if I encounter four different versions of this story in four different versions of the Vetala Panchavimshati, I will think about differences in vocabulary and the issues involved in the circulation of this text. I will ask why Somadeva used kavya and Shivadasa used katha. These are questions that I will be engaged in. But that’s obviously not the only way in which to read these texts.
Akhila: I’m a teacher from Chennai and this is what I understood from your talk. Since you’ve been emphasizing the ‘audience’ in your talk, I’m exercising my right as your audience. I feel that you chose the story of the Transposed Heads and the various retellings of them to understand context, authorship and also to––at the meta level––ask this question about when historians become storytellers and when storytellers also tell histories.
But here’s my question: I’m concerned about narratives. I think there are narratives that are created which have a hint of distortion, a sense of power very much like what Chimamanda Adichie says: stories are connected to power, you can create a narrative which gives you a completely different story because there is power involved. You can tell the story of the Native Americans by not beginning with the coming of the Europeans but by beginning with the bows and arrows of the Indians.
And in this day and age, I’m finding that there are lots of such narratives that are created––I don’t know how much of the public imagination they capture––but they do find their way into the class, they do find their way into the schools and the minds of the children. And these narratives seem very propagandist to me and I’m wondering how as a historian I can teach the craft of history, the scientific way of looking at history, so that stories don’t take hold of children’s mind in that manner.
MV: I think all of us who think of ourselves as historians, who are concerned about what is happening in the study of history today, would share that concern. And it’s not just in history; it’s in a whole range of other disciplines as well. But I think that this challenge is something that we’re going to have to meet. My intention was not only to celebrate this particular genre of katha texts. We know that there are a whole range of texts. Nor am I saying that one has to treat the past with reverence. And when it comes to stories, stories can lie.
To return to Omair’s point, there is an erasure of stories that surrounds us. I grew up with the Mahabharata and Hatim Tai. But that is not the case, by and large, for children today. It’s equally the case, though, that many of my students don’t know the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Ramayana in particular, is central to the political project of our time. But when you ask young people, ‘Who was Rama fighting in Dandakaranya?’, they don’t know.
So, I think we’re struggling at several levels. I mean the point of this conference was to talk about literature and history. But as I said, as a historian, my concern has been with a very vibrant tradition of Indian socio-economic history. Post-independence, one of the many things that historians tried to do was think of the past, not in terms of some great Sanskrit tradition, not in terms of kings and queens, but in terms of the everyday reality of people’s lives.
And I think that everyday reality of people’s lives is something we can still hold on to. We still meet students who understand things such as how does one work out the productivity of a piece of land or what is the particular chhaunk that is put in food in different parts of the country. So, one of the ways we can try is to think from the everyday and then build, because that makes possible these kinds of associations.
If I start from some very grand postulate, it doesn’t mean anything to the student. But asking questions about the world around them can disrupt certain things. And I think as teachers, or even as individuals, one of the things we can do is disrupt those certainties, because the narratives that are surrounding us are not only propaganda but also narratives of erasure and power. So, confronting those narratives involves confronting that power and confronting that erasure. We’re all in it together, right?
Audience Member 11: History definitely has an impact on literature. If literature starts having an impact on history and narratives are built on the basis of literature which is sans sources and evidence, will we have a disaster like the present NCERT history books?
MV: There are so many issues surrounding the NCERT history books today, let me take only one. The latest books have on their panel someone who is a writer of children’s books and the claim made is that they are more accessible for that reason.
You should write for children. I think it’s bad if history books are written from a perspective of expertise which does not take the child in account. The NCERT history textbooks that were there when I was growing up were written by some of the foremost historians of our time, but they were very boring. Now, that does not mean that a textbook should be written for entertainment. But if that textbook came alive, it would make a world of difference. Often for me as a student, it was my teacher who brought it alive. The book in itself is only one part of that classroom experience. So, you can have a great teacher tell you the most amazing things from a great textbook and you can have a great teacher make history come alive even though you have a boring textbook.
I was recently looking at the ICSE history textbooks and I’m sorry to say that the history in them is outdated, going back to the 1950s. At the same time, we have an elite in this country which is fine with sending their children to IB board schools but then the eighteen-year-olds who emerge from them don’t know the first thing about India. So, these questions about textbooks also need to be located within this larger educational politics.
I also don’t think we should be making this distinction between literature and history so stridently. Historians have always used stories. Unlike archaeologists who can work solely from material culture, the text is important to the historian. Now the text will always be one source and you will try to correlate it with other sources. If you have a Jaina text, you will try and look at what a contemporary Hindu text is saying. Or, if you have an epic narrative, you will ask if there is an inscription from that time. If you are reading an inscription like a prashasti, you will also look into what the evidence of archaeology reveals. So, the point is, you are using texts but you are asking questions of them. You are using the text as a source of evidence. So that question of sources, that question of source criticism is something that is absolutely fundamental to the history classroom. While a larger commonsensical understanding of history is that history is about rote learning, that it is not logical, not scientific, etc. the challenge of history is precisely this: how do you build a narrative from these silent and fragmentary sources? That’s the challenge.
If you can communicate even some of that excitement to students, I think they get it. Which is not to say there is a one-size-fits-all solution. It depends on the nature of the classroom. It depends on the students you are teaching, what languages they speak and a whole range of questions that I’m sure most of you are better placed to talk about and discuss.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 See, for example, Yigal Bronner, David Shulman and Gary Tubb (eds), Innovations and Turning Points: Towards a History of Kavya Literature (New Delhi: OUP, 2014) and Francesca Orsini, East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (New Delhi: OUP, 2023).
2 Adheesh Sathaye, ‘The Scribal Life of Folktales in Medieval India’, South Asian History and Culture 8(4) (2017): 430–37; here p. 432.
3 The text and translation is based on Damodar Jha (ed. and trans.), Vet¤¡lapañcaviṃśati, Vidyabhawan Sanskrit Granthamala 144 (Varanasi Chowkhamba Vidyabhawan: 1968), Story 6, pp. 52-56.
4 See Bihani Sarkar, Heroic Shaktism: The Cult of Durga in Ancient Indian Kingship (Oxford: The British Academy, 2017), p. xi.
5 Isabelle Ratié, ‘Fiction and Belief in Ancient and Early Medieval India’, in Alison James, Akihiro Kubo and Françoise Lavocat (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief (New York; London: Routledge, 2023), p. 404.
6 I have taken and translated the story from Vijayamunicandrasuri (ed.), Hemavijaya, Katharatnakara (Banaskantha: Omkar Sahityanidhi Vijayabhadra Charitable Trust, 1997), pp. 176-177.
7 Friedrich Wilhelm, ‘The Transposed Heads: The Migration of an Indian Motif’, Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 58/59 (1977–78), p. 409.
8 Vijaydan Detha, Chouboli and Other Stories, Volume 1, translated by Christi A. Merrill with Kailash Kabir (New Delhi: Katha, 2010).
9Ibid., pp. 74-75.
10Ibid., p. 76.
11 Girish Karnad, Hayavadana (New Delhi: OUP, 1975
49
Visvanathan / The Historian and the Storyteller
[Reprint Edition 2016]).
12 See Steven Collins (ed.), Readings of the Vessantara Jataka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Romila Thapar, Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999); Paula Richman (ed.), Many Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition (New Delhi: OUP, 2000).
13 V. Hämeen-Anttila, To Make the Short Story Long: The Development of the Frame-Story Structure in Sanskrit Literature: The Vedic and Epic Models, Doctoral Thesis (University of Helsinki, 2018).
14 Michael Witzel, ‘On the Origin of the Literary Device of the “Frame Story” in Old Indian Literature’, in Harry Falk (ed.), Hindusmus und Buddhismus: Festschrift für Ulrich Schneider (Freiburg: Hedwig Falk, 1987), pp. 380-414.
15 See Nasreen Munni Kabir, Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar (New Delhi: OUP, 1999), p. 69.
16 Csaba Dezső, 2010, ‘Encounters with Vet¤¡las: Studies on Fabulous Creatures I’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 63 (4), pp. 391-426.
17 Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1956 [Reprint Edition 2008]), p. 35.
18 Sathaye 2017.
19 See Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, ‘Origin of the Rajputs: The Political, Economic and Social Processes in Early Medieval Rajasthan’, in The Making of Early Medieval India, (New Delhi: OUP, 1976 [Second Edition 2012]), pp. 59
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