Vishwasmohan Jha
Vishwasmohan Jha
राजतरंगिणी की कहानियां: कश्मीर की गाथाएं (RAJTARANGINI KI KAHANIYAN: KASHMIR KI GATHAYEN) by Devika Rangachari 150, 2018, pp., 120
November 2019, volume 43, No 11

Devika Rangachari, the well-known story-teller, is an old hand at the Kashmir chronicle that is the Rājataraṅgiṇī of Kalhaṇa, having studied it at great length from what she has called ‘a gender perspective’. The book under review is a Hindi translation of her Stories from Rajatarangini: Tales from Kashmir (CBT, 2001). It is a well-chosen collection–though others like me will naturally have their own sets of choices–of sixteen stories (one told in two parts) from the work of Kalhaṇa. While using her own imagination to supply them with the required additional details for a riveting narration, the writer has generally been careful to keep the stories firmly rooted in their original content and context, and has succeeded in retaining the flavour of the times to which they belong. For this purpose, useful explanations too have been provided here and there, as in explaining the nāgas as ‘serpent deities of the lake’ (p. 5) or the dīnāra (dīnnāra in the original text) as ‘currency in coin’ (p. 114).

Rarely, however, there occur quite unnecessary and misleading deviations from the text. For example, in the last story (‘The Coins in a Lakh’), an adaptation of the Eighth Taraṅga (verses 124-156), we read about a nāga merchant whereas the original does not refer to or suggest any such association of the merchant, who is simply called a vaṇij, appropriately translated as Bania or Seth by RS Pandit. The story is about this unnamed Bania and a rich person, also unnamed. The latter has been turned into a hard-working person who has saved a good amount of money, which is all right (as are a few other insertions from Rangachari’s side); however, he has also needlessly been given a name of Vijaya. The historical flavour of these stories stems first and foremost from the retention of the original historical names, and Vijaya was not only the name of a celebrated king but also of other persons in the original text, and ought to have been reserved for those contexts. Also, the reader would be less puzzled if told that dīnāra in this story was a copper coin (as explained by Pandit in his translation of the Rājataraṅgiṇī, p. 77fn103), not of silver or gold as commonly understood.

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