Vetaal and Vikram: Riddles of the Undead

By Gayathri Prabhu

'This riddle can end in two ways: speech and defeat, or silence and death.' Vetaal and Vikram is a playful retelling of one of India's most celebrated cycles of stories. The narrative of King Vikram and the Vetaal is located within the Kathasaritsagara, an eleventh-century Sanskrit text. The Vetaal who is neither living nor dead is a consummate storyteller, and Vikram is a listener who can neither speak nor stay silent. Together they are destined to walk a labyrinth of stories in the course of a moonless night in a cremation ground. In 1870, eleven of the Vetaal's stories were adapted to English by the famed scholar-explorer Richard Francis Burton who tailored them to his audience's gothic taste. Vetaal and Vikram is a contemporary response that includes Burton within its storytelling folds. Fantastical and delightful, this retelling dissolves the lines between speaker and listener, desire and duty, life and death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Oct 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353573409

Gayathri Prabhu

Gayathri Prabhu is the author of the memoir If I Had to Tell It Again, and the novels The Untitled, Birdswim Fishfly and Maya. She is the recipient of the RK Narayan award (2019) and teaches literary studies at the Manipal Centre for Humanities.

Book preview

The Keeper of the Thread

(Sutradhaar)

AS THE KEEPER of the thread, it falls upon me to usher you into a world of the most intricate and expansive storytelling ever woven.

The girth and horizon of this telling will exceed your imagination. A frame narrative, where stories fit into stories, this is the largest single collection known to us. Nearly every character in here will tell you a story, and characters within that story are not coy about narrating their own story about someone who then has a story to tell too. If stories are infectious, this is a pandemic that can mow down the entire human race.

How does one narrate a tale that has neither beginning nor end, that remains neither said nor unsaid, that has as many tellers as it does listeners, that folds into itself so many times that an atom seems as expansive as the cosmos?

One does not.

One lets the story find its own way, as this has for centuries.

Or one tells the story by listening.

Please dip a toe, wade in gently, immerse, dive, plunge, float, drift. This is the Kathasaritsagara, the ocean-created-by-rivers-of-stories. Each river created by countless streams, each stream by dainty rivulets, each rivulet by clinging droplets of water. From the depths of this ocean, rising as one perfectly frothy and lofty wave, is the story of Trivikramasena and Vetaal, an unconventional pair for an unending tale.

Trivikramasena (Vikram to his pals) was a king, probably historical, certainly of mythic proportions. The Vetaal on the other hand is an entity that inhabits corpses, creating the illusion of life, and yet not among the living, nor dead; maybe just undead. A spirit-possessed corpse. One is tempted to draw a zombie comparison but that’s uncomfortably close to the pop culture bandwagon, and completely unfair to any self-respecting Vetaal. For, like everyone else in the Kathasaritsagara, our Vetaal is a consummate storyteller, and the king is a passionate listener with no paucity of editorial comments. Telling and listening is not only addictive, it is dangerous. No cleaving of the real from the fictional, and every word in turn threatening to turn inside out. Only the Gods could have created such a thing. This is the sentiment of Somadeva, the author of the Kathasaritsagara.

It all began on Mount Kailash, Somadeva tells us, the holy abode of the ascetic god Shiva and his consort Parvati, when Parvati pestered her husband to entertain her with stories. Not a word of it would have reached us earthlings were it not for a disobedient gana, a mere attendant in the Lord’s household. The gana eavesdropped on the tale and was promptly cursed to an earthly stint, to be released from the curse of mortality only when he repeats the tale to another cursed being.

But how did Somadeva, a Shaivaite Brahmin in the court of the King of Kashmir, regular mortal of the eleventh century, gain access to this infinite and divine ocean of stories? I am anything but original, Somadeva tells us, it all came from an older text – the Brhatkatha or the ‘Long Story’ written by Gunadhya, yet another exiled and cursed attendant of Shiva. A fragmentary text, inscribed in blood, narrated in a non-human language, now completely untraceable. With neither beginning nor end, voices working in concentric circles, springing from the divine, skimming over the mortal, cocooning back into the divine.

Once you enter the oceanic labyrinth that is the Kathasaritsagara, there is no way out. Such is the work, such is the secret. You have to listen constantly or be drowned in its unceasing narrative waves. If you stay afloat (and wish to avoid a dastardly curse) then you have to await a listener, find the words to share the delights of the fictional and the fabulist. This is Somadeva’s fate. He has been assigned to entertain his king’s consort. The stories that Shiva told Parvati are the stories that Somadeva will repeat to Queen Suryavati. Impeccable pedigree.

The centuries tide over, inviting another storyteller. When Richard Francis Burton wanders into this labyrinth of stories, it is the middle of the nineteenth century and his queen is Victoria. Burton arrives in India at the tumultuous age of twenty-one, an ensign in the British East India Company’s army with plans of personal advancement. Knowledge of local languages may be part of the job profile, but the young Englishman is a fiend for learning tongues, and has picked up rudiments of seven Indian languages within his first months. For his Hindustani examinations, he is asked to study a translated excerpt of Somadeva’s epic – this one is called Betaalpachisi, or twenty-five-stories-of-Vetaal.

Burton, who would be celebrated in England for being a fearless explorer of hostile topography did not fear mortals but was petrified of anything to do with graves and ghouls. Vikram’s new-moon adventure with a Vetaal haunted him. It read too much like a bestseller to remain a crusty textbook. Two decades later, travelling through Brazil with his wife – one exotic land bringing to mind another – Burton wrote a loose adaptation, choosing eleven stories of the Vetaal, inserting personal asides, making everything more macabre till he could confidently claim them to be ‘Tales of Hindu Devilry’. It did have all the makings of a bestseller, Burton thought, an ancient religion, dollops of black magic, passionate love stories, dashing kings and sexy women, and best of all, those riddles, those haunting questions with beguiling answers. Everything else, Burton made up. This was the perfect vehicle for his ethnographic notes, for all the cultural trivia that he loved to collect about the erotic Orient. The book would never go out of print and ensconced his younger apprentice self in the folds of the telling. ‘The merit of the old stories lies in their suggestiveness and in their general applicability. I have ventured to remedy the consciousness of their language, and to clothe the skeleton with flesh and blood,’ Burton wrote in the preface to the first edition of Vikram and the Vampire, 1870.

Good idea, Burton, I say, even if I cringe at your distortions, and maybe more than one can play the game; take apart the flesh and blood, go back to the skeleton, then clothe it once again, not to remedy but to unremedy.

So enters your present sutradhaar, to play with the eleven stories of the Vetaal that Burton picked. Let us indulge Burton and take him along with us, check back with Somadeva (who swears on being a faithful plagiarist to Gunadhya), give due authorial credit to Shiva, and then we will recast the stories for our ear. Some tellings sorely beg for perspective. Surely you agree – it is about time a living woman joined this messy author–character melee.

To count drops in the ocean or stars in the sky is the pastime of fools, but like Shiva, Gunadhya, Somadeva, Burton, and this sutradhaar, the storyteller’s main task is not creation but transmission of the story, and to do so from within its pleats. Then the narrative breathes, expands; such is this drop of story gathered from an ocean of rising waves or tarangas. There has never been nor will there ever be a telling that splinters into a galaxy of stories like this does, the telling, the listening, the untelling, the unlistening, the sheer cacophony of multiple imaginations, the silent vacuum beneath, the cosmic nothingness.

How does one tell a story like this?

One does not.

Seat of the Story

(Kathapeetha)

THE BLUE GOD clears his ash-streaked throat and starts to tell the story to appease his wife. Shiva has promised her something sublime, and Parvati will settle for nothing less. That recent episode involving a voluptuous river and her husband’s matted hair has stirred her jealousy. They have an agreement – this story will better any other and it will be exclusively hers. But curiosity has a way of slipping through locked doors, especially when a curious gana is involved. The gana cannot keep a word from his wife and the wife loves nothing more than to report everything back to her mistress, Parvati. The story is not exclusive anymore. And Parvati is livid. Betrayed. No doubt this has to end in a curse, for the gana and for a friend who tries to intervene on his behalf. They receive the most dreaded banishment for their kind – mortality.

The cursed ganas plead for mercy and Parvati relents. The only remedy, she announces, would be to find a storytelling moment in their mortal wanderings – when Figure A (the offending gana) repeats the story to Figure B (a cursed soul from some other story) who will tell it to Figure C (the gana’s friend). This telling contains seven great stories in seven hundred thousand verses – an extraordinary feat! Figure C, who is destined to be reborn as the mortal Gunadhya, is given the responsibility of making the story famous in the world – the story that nobody but Parvati was meant to hear – and why they were being punished to start with.

Baffled? You are supposed to be. Because such is the seat of the story.

But wait, it gets more interesting.

Gunadhya is meant to receive the story after he has forsaken all the languages he knows. Try telling a story of seven hundred thousand verses without language – that’s undistilled horror, especially if you have to write it with your blood.

Yes, a complicated storytelling detour, and so this deserves a gist.

Gunadhya is born a linguist, a scholar, and all-round genius in the court of the King Satavahana. And like many academics, he gets into an egoistical wager with a colleague about grammar and pedagogy. The price of losing the bet is to renounce Sanskrit, Prakrit and all vernacular languages, which would only leave him with silence. As we led with the spoiler, you already know that Gunadhya lost this bet and all his languages. The only thing to do in such grave silence is to head to the forests, where luckily he gets to eavesdrop on a large gathering of Pishachas (scary nocturnal creatures) – long enough to learn their Paishachi speech. Now he has a language, but one that is useless for conversations with other humans. Clearly a man marked to suffer.

Gunadhya is convinced mortal life is not for him, but there is no way to return to the divine form unless Parvati’s diktat is followed: a) listen to the story b) make it popular. So there he sits in the forest, for seven long years, listening to the seven great cluster of stories (from the eavesdropper gana), all seven hundred thousand couplets, and then writing it in the only language available to him – the dreadful Paishachi. Gunadhya must have been the first writer to call writing a bloody pain; with no supply of ink in the forest, every word has to be written in his own blood. The writing completed (oh, so painfully!), Gunadhya mulls over how to spread the good word as necessitated by his curse. He decides to trust King Satavahana again – nobody else has the clout and the manuscript is promptly dispatched.

When the king looks at the blood-stained manuscript in a demonic script nobody can read, it is sent right back with words of scorn. The rejected writer then lights a large bonfire on a deserted hill and begins to throw pages of the manuscript into the flames. One page after another, but only after he reads it aloud to the birds and animals that weep as the pages turn to smoke. Gunadhya has burnt six cycles of stories, over six hundred thousand verses, and is contemplating burning the remainder, his favourite verses, when the king falls ill.

A medical investigation is conducted. It is the bad meat, say the physicians. And the hunters blame the animals – they are listening to some sob story on a hill and moping away. It sounds ludicrous enough for the king to make a visit to the site of the fire. There, the king admits his folly in casting aside a gifted scholar-poet, and offers to publish the last part of the manuscript, all one hundred thousand verses. Finally released from the curse, the writer can now relinquish his mortal frame and return to his heavenly abode.

To undertake so much trouble for the vagaries of publishing and friendship (remember, Gunadhya was the gana who tried to defend a friend who eavesdropped on Shiva’s tale) makes one ruminate. Especially because the manuscript has not survived, nor is there proof that it ever existed or even if Gunadhya lit the pyre of words. But a few hundred years later, the narrative re-emerges in its most respectable garb – in Sanskrit, by a court poet, all in ink – and it has never stayed out of the public eye since. It makes one eager to know what lies in the original text to merit all this

Reviews for Vetaal and Vikram

[Aryan Baer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What an incredible journey, just like the seeds hide the trees and the tress hide more seeds in them. Is there an end or a beginning to this ? LOVED IT!