Indian Campfire Tales

KA

By Roberto Calasso

Knopf

$27.50, 464 pp.

The first words the giant black eagle Garuda utters after his birth at the beginning of Roberto Calassos latest book Ka are: "So many things are happening, so many stories one inside the other, with every link hiding yet more stories." Garuda's musings may be extended to the book itself, which is a collection of all the stories of Hindu mythology--some bizarre, some beautiful, many grotesque and all thoroughly engrossing--recast with an eye for the postmodern reader and his impatient but eager sensibilities. Taking a cue from the Mahabharata--a seminal Indian text containing many of the major stories of Hindu mythology--Roberto Calasso (here translated from the Italian by noted scholar Tim Parks) has combined the stories from all aspects and ages of Hindu culture to recreate for the reader "the mind and gods of India."

Ka is the third and central work of Calasso's five-book project about mythical and intellectual beginnings. The first book in the series was the critically and popularly acclaimed The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which recounted with proper flair and fervor the entire chronology and theogeny of Greek and Roman mythology for over-stimulated postmodern audience. Next came The Ruin of Kasch, which told of how modern culture and ideas can spring from the complete decimation of a past culture. In Ka, Calasso tackles the myths of the Indian subcontinent and traces the theological origins of that culture from these stories.

But Ka is neither a treatise nor a text-book. Actually, no one is really sure what the book is. What can be said is that Ka contains a fascinating collection of stories at once comical, mysterious, unnerving and erotic, told by a brilliant modern narrator. The book actually reads like a post-modern Hindu campfire story. The fifteen sections of the book recount all the stories contained in the major theological and mythological texts of India, but Calasso does not assume any prior knowledge of the Rig-Veda, the Mahabharata or the like, nor does he linger on the stories' historical background. His versions of the great myths are fresh and exciting (if slightly bizarre and grotesque) fairy tales of a sort, not historical or ideological records, and are accompanied by a running modern philosophical commentary by the articulate and learned Calasso ("Is there any part of literary history Calasso isn't familiar with?", you may ask yourself by the end of this book) on the bizarre and sometimes grotesque events of the stories. Two birds are killed with one tome (groan), in a sense: on the one hand there is the excitement of these ancient and unusual non-Western tales; on the other hand, there is that intriguing way of approaching the tales that a Western end-of-the-millenium audience can't help but love.

This raises a major problem with writing about Eastern, particularly Indian thought in the Western world: how to resist the threat of being branded "New Age." India in particular has gone from being a societal punchline (insert Slurpee joke here) to the spiritually uplifting culture du jour: department stores are peddling the ritualistic body paint known as henna, Madonna's got everyone chanting shantih to a disco beat. In a culture based largely on rather mundane Christian morality and imagery, people made of thoughts, eagles born from copulating trees and spontaneously appearing mountains all have the opportunity to be exploited for their "exoticism" and "Orientalism." The sexually explicit exploits of the Hindu pantheon are particularly vulnerable to such a reading--India is the culture that brought us the Kama Sutra, after all.

Roberto Calasso resists this temptation to "exoticise" or trivialize the stories through humor with triumphant results. Don't misunderstand--there is plenty of humor, horror and wonder about the stories is Calasso's writing; but these feelings spring from Calasso's treatment of the stories as texts to learn from, not to snicker pre-pubescently at. Even more interesting is his incorporation of Western texts and ideas into a decidedly Eastern way of thinking. Thus Proust becomes a Vedic prayer-chant master; the great creator-spirit Prajapat faces Kafka-esque dilemmas that lead him to be compared to The Trial s K. The gods and mythical figures of Ka are not the heavy-handed, wrathful gods of the West. These are thinking, breathing creatures who can bitch and moan, laugh and cry, love and be loved just like us--not so exotic, after all.