But, alas, it’s more like a luxury cruise than an adventure. The stories seem to have lost some of the original rawness and sense of wonder through the various translations over the centuries.
The book, however, is perfect for the times we live in: one of those open-it-anywhere books in which you can dip in and pick up and chew on a nugget. You have it all, between two covers: from excerpts of P. Lal’s long-ongoing "transcreation" of the Mahabharata, to bits of the Ramayana, and legends and folk tales from Syrian Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Jain sources. The section on folk tales has some interesting stories about simple Afghan travellers in India. The more interesting and less familiar sections of the anthology are of tribal legends and folk tales from the Northeast—many of which are about creation. They tell of the exchange of body parts between men and women—and between humans and animals.
While Radice has retold most of these stories, he’s reticent with his perceptive comments. For example, while writing about those who wrote about creation, he appreciated "the capacity that Indians had, right at the dawn of their civilisation, for reaching out imaginatively to what might be beyond their gods".
An expert on Bengali literature, he has slipped up with the Jain canon. According to latest research, Mahavir was a reformer and not the founder of the Jain religion. Perhaps Captain Radice would have done better had he limited himself to scooping out his stories from the Bay of Bengal.
