It is amazing that the story of Vikram and Vetal which has been translated so many times, finds yet another translation in The Undead Ghoul and the Clever Raja: Twenty-five Tales of the Vetala Panchavimshati by Meena Arora Nayak. It is a welcome addition as it is always a pleasure to read the story all over again.
Striking among the possible motivations for taking up the well-known and well-translated work seems to be the quest to find an English equivalent for Vetal. Nayak rightly says that ‘Those of us who grew up listening to or reading Vikram and Vetal stories have a mental image of the Vetal. For some of us, that image derives from the popular television series, Vikram aur Betaal that aired on Doordarshan in 1985-86. In this series the Vetal is shown as an old man with scraggly white hair and an evil grin under a long witchy nose, riding on Vikram’s muscular back.’ (Not to mention the orange-red lipstick that the Betaal wore!) Nayak calls the Vetal a shapeshifter and so could be defined in many ways, however, she draws a close association between the Vetal and the ‘shadowy ghoulish creatures such as bhutas, pretas and pishachas. The former two are spectral remains of people who have died…. Pishachas, on the other hand, are not remnants of humans or residual energy from the deceased beings; therefore, they have no way of moving on… they are spirits of nature that exist in nature and feed on human flesh. Vetals are also spirits of human nature, they do not normally eat human flesh but inhabit human corpses….’ So Nayak calls her Vetal the ‘Undead Ghoul’.
The translation recalls to the mind the beautiful work by scholar Chandra Rajan, almost thirty years ago, under the title of Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie. Chandra has devoted a whole section of five pages to discuss how the Vetal can be described in English. She says the word ‘Vetal’ is not of Sanskrit origin and denotes, ‘a being, a power, or divinity that is non-Vedic, non-Brahminic (…not for class but for a system of beliefs, practices and worship), even pre-Vedic in all probability.’ She groups the Vetal with semi-divine beings like yakshas, yakshis, vidyadharas and so on who are attendant on Siva, as mentioned by Nayak too. In order to emphasize that the Vetal is not necessarily malevolent or evil, she has called it the Genie in her title, as in this story the Vetal does grant Vikramaditya a wish and warns him against impending evil. She says she has done so also because of its sonic similarity with the word ‘genius’…. A genius is a guardian spirit, an attendant spirit. The plural of genius is genii. Her predecessor, Richard Burton, had translated it as Vikram and the Vampire, which of course is a long haul.
Both Meena Nayak and Chandra Rajan veer the reader towards a similar understanding of the Vetal where something like shamanistic practices exists between the Vetal and the yogi… a tantric worship of divinities like the Vetal. Nayak further draws associations between Siva’s Kalabhairava form (recounts the origin myth of Kalabhairava) and Vetal worship as part of Vamachara Tantra. All this is by way of support to an argument to construct the context of the Vetal. The intuitive understanding of the word, supported by an understanding that comes from its day-to-day usage in other Indian languages, does not require a background. The use of words like ‘ghoul’ or ‘genie’ just does not seem apt. They still fall short of the complete feel. Perhaps the next translator could retain the word ‘Vetal’ and introduce it into the English language for it has no satisfactory equivalent. More so because the coming generations may not have the benefit of the tales being related off and on or watching tele-serials like Vikram aur Betaal or even hear the word being used in everyday conversations. Keeping all the descriptions given by the translators and still using the original word may help it retain its resonance.
After so much discussion on the title, the other discussion that takes much time is to figure out who Vikramaditya was. Was he a historical or mythical figure? The answer is not so important except scholastically speaking, because he has charmed so many generations and will continue to do so. His historicity lies in our minds.
There are twenty-five tales as is evident from the title and a kathamukh or a backgrounder, told simply and engagingly by Meena Nayak. She has opted out of using verse as the text is interspersed with, in order to keep the momentum of the stories and make them more accessible to the modern reader. The stories have retained their fluidity and feel in the retelling. Nayak has also kept the subtle humour or sarcasm, as the case may be, intact. A good read.
Sudhamahi Regunathan, former Vice-Chancellor of the Jain Vishva Bharati University in Ladnun, Rajasthan, is the author of Rishabhayan: The Story of the First King (2014), The Colours of Desire on the Canvas of Restraint, and From This Birth to Another: Stories from Jaina Literature (2019).