Shiva's Own Story: An SOS For Your Soul

Feb. 7, 2011 - PRLog -- Due to widespread illiteracy, the oral medium of narrating stories, or the ‘katha,’ holds a preeminent status in the East. It helps preserve religious and moral culture contained in various epics and permits the narrator to modify the characters and incidents to suit a particular audience.

Gunadhya’s “Katha Sarita Sagara” (Ocean of Stories) was a compendium of Indian legends, fairy tales and folk tales written in the Paisachi dialect. The ‘Brihatkatha’ is supposedly Lord Shiva’s narrative to entertain his wife Parvati, and is a complex collection of stories. It was retold in Sanskrit by a Saivite Brahmin named Somadeva for entertaining queen Suryamati, wife of king Anantadeva of Kashmir (1063-1081). The same was translated into English by C.H. Tawney (1837-1922) and published in 1880. N.M. Penzer blended Hindu mythology with Buddhist and tantric beliefs, recasting the stories in 1924. Shiva’s Own Story is an abridged version of that composition.

The stories are set in 10th- to 11th-century India, when the country was divided into small kingdoms, with no dearth of monarchs with dynastic ambitions. The kings were polygamous and maintained harems. Their matrimonial alliances were often strategic, with a view to expand their kingdoms and rake in finances through dowry. They patronized the fine arts, were partial to big game hunting, and maintained a bevy of slaves to cater to all their requirements. Reading the ‘Brihatkatha’ is supposed to confer the reader with celestial powers and assure him or her a slot in paradise!

SHIVA’S OWN STORY: AN SOS FOR YOUR SOUL (ISBN: 978-1-60976-425-8) is available on Jan. 31, 2011 for $33 and can be ordered through the publisher’s website:
http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/ShivasOwnSt...
or at www.amazon.com or http://www.barnesandnoble.com
Wholesalers please email BookOrder@AEG-Online-Store.com

About the Author: Dr K Chandra Sekhar is a Naval veteran and a practicing anesthesiologist in the port city of Visakhapatnam along the east coast of the Indian peninsula.
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