100 Romantic Tales from India: Retellings from the Puranas, Epics, and Folk Traditions (Indian Mythology Retold) by Shweta Shirsat

Three thousand years of love, in a hundred stories. From the fire that Sati walked into for her husband, to the unbaked clay pot that drowned Sohni in the Chenab river at midnight, to the letter a princess wrote to a god — Indian mythology, folklore, and devotional literature contain some of the most devastating and most beautiful love stories ever told. They have survived for millennia not because they are sacred, but because they are true. They know things about desire and grief and the particular way that love bends under the weight of duty that no other tradition quite says with the same directness. 100 Romantic Tales from India gathers one hundred of these stories into a single volume — retold in vivid, contemporary prose for readers sixteen and older. Drawing from the Puranas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata Purana, the Tamil Bhakti tradition, the Sufi ballads of Punjab and Sindh, the Bengali Mangal-Kavya, and the regional folk traditions of the subcontinent, this collection moves from the creation myths of the gods to the tragic pairs of the northwestern deserts, from Krishna's Vrindavan to Mirabai's temple. Every tale includes a Deeper Current insert giving one layer of theological or cultural context — enough to open a door, not enough to close an argument. This is the book for readers who grew up hearing fragments of these stories and wanted them told with intelligence and without condescension. For lovers of Amish Tripathi, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Devdutt Pattanaik who want something rawer and less familiar. For anyone who has ever found themselves wondering what Urmila felt during the fourteen years she slept, or what Draupadi's question in the dicing hall actually meant, or why the tradition that called Radha's love the highest form of devotion also required her to be married to someone else. Read more