Tale of the Syamantak Jewel and Other Stories

The rudiments of the stories are histories in the sense that, the sage author Vedavyas terms them as itihas and cites them in the course of the narrative of his epic poem, Mahabharata. And the stories have been chosen from the text of the Mahabharata, except the last tale of Bharadwaj that has been taken from Shrimadbhagwatam of Vedavyas, too. Certain situations and certain characters and the prevalent mood of the moment in the epic call up these tales as illustrations, or for their general moral content meant for the listener’s benefit. Their relevance to the situation and character is unimpeachable. Also, confined as they are to the limits of an instance of discourse, the digression does not impair the epic structure or format, but adds to richness of texture, its world view. Whereas in their original appearance in the course of narrative these histories are characterized by brevity for the immediacy and intensity of effect, Narula has chosen them for the scope of the drama in the situation and the gradual revelation of and evolution of characters in the perspective of the milieu in which they are placed. For instance, A Game of Dice is originally the well known ancient tale of King Nal and Damyanti was told to the Pandava prince Yudhishtir during the Pandavas’ stay in the forest, Kamyakvan, to take the edge off his mental anguish and overwhelming sense of guilt, by the great itinerant Maharshi Brihadashwa. It runs into a few paragraphs. Narula takes the bare, basic story with its few original characters and movement of the plot. In his retelling and transcreating it develops into a longer complex narrative that becomes something of a novella running into more that a hundred pages. The other stories too have been chosen from the Mahabharata. Little tales become narratives, adapted and written particularly for the interest of the modern reader giving them an insight into quality of the great epic poem.