SKT 203 | Intermediate Sanskrit III: Sanskrit Narratives

January 6 - March 7, 2025

Course Description

Once upon a time, the story goes, the god Śiva told his wife Pārvatī a long and fascinating tale, which was overheard by one of his attendants. This act of eavesdropping, combined with several acts of divine punishment, mean the story is made known on earth – yet an act of human pride and stupidity leads to six sevenths of the story being burned. Of the remainder of this mythical Bṛhatkathā (or ‘Long Story’), five purported retellings survive, three of which are in Sanskrit. In this course, we will be reading excerpts from two of these retellings, the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha or ‘Verse Summary of the Bṛhatkathā’ and the (slightly more poetically named!) Kathāsaritsāgara or ‘Ocean of Streams of Stories’.

Both of these feature a narrative frame within which numerous individual stories are told, some long, some short, some funny, some thought-provoking, some bawdy, some philosophical. We will begin by reading a longer story from the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha in which Sānudāsa, an overly earnest young man, comes to enjoy life’s pleasures with the help of his friends and the mysterious Blue Lotus Nectar. We will then read excerpts from the Kathāsaritsāgara, the masterly work of Somadeva, a court poet from 11th-century Kashmir. His Sanskrit is deceptively simple, but carefully crafted and supremely elegant. The multi-cultural, multi-religious society he lives in shines through in many of his stories.

For all our readings, we will be using the instructor’s Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit reader, which provides copious grammar and vocab notes on every passage. We will read passages not covered in last year’s SKT 203 last year, so that anyone who wishes to rejoin will be most welcome!