Out of the land of the desert sun, where camels roam and the lore is rich, come eternal tales of power, greed and grief; of devious yogis and beings who live in clouds; and of various iterations of love. It’s a side of Rajasthan that tourists don’t see, but is held dear by the ancient communities of this region.
The tales are meant to be told, passed down orally, and are seldom written down. But over nearly five decades, one Rajasthani literary icon, Vijaydan Detha aka Bijji (1926-2013), toured the diverse state, collecting the stories and preserving them on paper.
Detha gathered tales from rural homemakers, monks, musicians, farmers and wandering communities of nomads. His collection was published over several years, starting in the 1960s, and eventually added up to a 14-volume anthology called Batan ri Phulwari (literally, Garden of Tales).
Now, 18 of these stories have been translated into English by Vishes Kothari, and published as The Garden of Tales (Harper Perennial; February 2023).
“Rajasthani is very underrepresented in translations in India,” says Kothari, also a financial consultant.“Detha is the most important Rajasthani prose writer of the 20th century. So if one wants to better represent Rajasthani literature, his anthology is the obvious choice.”
Detha’s victory, Kothari says, “is in how he managed to convey an oral culture into written form. His prose never loses that texture of orality, because it is written to mirror the manner in which laypeople talk.”
The stories Detha collected often deal with fundamental, even primeval, human experience. Some may be familiar to Indian movie-goers from their screen adaptions. These include the classics Duvidha (directed by Mani Kaul; 1973), the story of a ghost who falls in love with a new bride just arrived in the village; and Charandas Chor (Shyam Benegal; 1975), about a petty thief who makes five promises, decides to stay true to them, and ends up dead.
The new English translation opens with a tale that is well known across Rajasthan. New Birth is about a potter and his wife who begin to take in travellers for the night, kill them and steal their riches. They have a son who has been travelling for 16 years. When he arrives, they fail to recognise him, kill him, then discover their mistake and end their own lives.
Fables of lessons learnt and evil deeds punished abound in the collection, but there is often this kind of twist in the tale. “When picking which stories to translate, the strength of the storyline and how much it challenges us with the unexpected, was always at the back of my mind,” Kothari says. “I wanted the stories be very different from what you would expect a typical folk story to be.”
Among the most unexpected is Double Lives, a story about two women who are tricked into marrying each other, but fall in love and go on a magical journey of discovery, heartbreak and revival. (Click here to read an excerpt)
This is Kothari’s second book of Detha translations. The first was Timeless Tales from Marwar (Penguin Random House; 2020), a collection of stories suitable for children.
This time around, Kothari wrestled with a fresh problem: how to deal with elements of casteism, racism, sexism and other kind of bias. “Social realities shape this world of whimsy… The call that we took was that the worlds need to be presented in translation as they are — fantastic and yet problematic — and we decided against sanitization,” he writes, in his note from the translator.
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