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The god Shiva is utterly seduced by Mohini, the enchanting female form assumed by the god Vishnu during the churning of the ocean for nectar. A barber employs wit and wile and rumours of witchcraft to win his wife back from the lustful attentions of their king. The celestial nymph Urvashi curses the Pandava prince Arjuna when he rejects her sexual advances. A woman caught in adultery befools her elders with a religious ritual. A man with a disagreeable missing wife insists nevertheless that she be recovered by his ruler who has a similar problem.
Refined, colloquial, romantic, cynical, satirical by turns, these stories of erotic love, elegantly translated from the Sanskrit classics, make a sustained argument for the secular ends of life of desire tempered with discrimination and pleasure with restraint.
Imprint: India Penguin Classics
Published: Feb/2014
ISBN: 9780143415404
Length : 256 Pages
MRP : ₹399.00
Imprint: Penguin Audio
Published:
ISBN:
Imprint: India Penguin Classics
Published: Feb/2014
ISBN: 9789351186243
Length : 256 Pages
MRP : ₹399.00
The god Shiva is utterly seduced by Mohini, the enchanting female form assumed by the god Vishnu during the churning of the ocean for nectar. A barber employs wit and wile and rumours of witchcraft to win his wife back from the lustful attentions of their king. The celestial nymph Urvashi curses the Pandava prince Arjuna when he rejects her sexual advances. A woman caught in adultery befools her elders with a religious ritual. A man with a disagreeable missing wife insists nevertheless that she be recovered by his ruler who has a similar problem.
Refined, colloquial, romantic, cynical, satirical by turns, these stories of erotic love, elegantly translated from the Sanskrit classics, make a sustained argument for the secular ends of life of desire tempered with discrimination and pleasure with restraint.
Kshemendra (c.990 - c.1070) was an 11th-century Sanskrit poet from Kashmir, India. His literary output includes still-studied works on poetics and prosody, apart from devotional and didactic verse, mordant social satire and a lost history of the kings of Kashmir. Eighteen of these works were recovered in the past century, and sixteen are known only through citations. They have established Kshemendra as a prolific and multifaceted writer on a wide variety of subjects and an important name in classical Sanskrit literature.