Misplacing Heads, Textual Formation, and Reformation: Somadeva’s Kathā Sarit Sāgara, Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads, and Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana
Mehvish Siddiqui
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 3
Abstract
Vetala, the daemon, tests King Vikramaditya’s wisdom by telling him tales and making him solve a riddle at the end of each tale. This premise forms the structure of Somadeva’s 11 th century collection of Indian folktales retold in Sanskrit—the Kathasaritasagara. One of the tales in the book is about a woman who accidentally switches the head of her husband with that of her brother. Drawing from this 11 th century tale, Thomas Mann published a novella in 1940, The Transposed Heads, which further inspired Girish Karnad’s 1972 play Hayavadana. This paper explores the textual trajectory of the aforementioned tale and attempts to study the “sameness” and the “otherness” of the tale in its variations.
Keywords: Heidegger, Time, Space, Identity, Memory, Dasein
Mehvish Siddiqui (mehvish_siddiqui@hotmail.com) is a Master’s student in English at Hindu College, University of Delhi. She is interested in exploring the singular palimpsest of personal identity which composes the larger palimpsest of collective identity. The questions of time, space, and memory fascinate her and form the buttress against which rests her research interest in being, gender, authority, and religion. She is currently researching the role of spatiality in selffashioning.