Plunging the Ocean

Book excerpt: Plunging the Ocean engages with the voluminous content of the Kathāsaritsāgara, a text meant for courtly entertainment, locating the various points of its retelling. The volume weaves gender as the discursive mesh with various themes such as caste, class, occupations, control and flow of resources or wealth, religious practices, sexuality and power structures to highlight the discourse of the text itself. In their creation and negotiation with the past, the narratives are seen as crucially demonstrating the importance of 'social space'; in the organization of space itself and in the reflection of social relations of production and reproduction. The conclusion highlights the contradictions inherent in the characters and plots, in the folk antecedents and monarchical elite appropriation of the kathās, in conformity and subversion. The structures of power that create systems of knowledge are essentially projected as ominously omnipresent in the 'Ocean of Stories'.