Hidden Treasures Of India
Folktales & Stories from Puranas
Hand-picked Puranic tales and folktales spanning four yugas — including Raavan's lineage and Vasishtha's failures — for readers new and familiar alike.
Overview
Kanupriya Ajitsaria's collection moves across all four yugas, drawing from the Puranas, the Ramayana, and regional folktales to gather stories that rarely share the same volume. Alongside the familiar divine incarnations, there is the lineage of Raavan — told with the detail the popular versions usually omit. There is the story of Vasishtha, greatest of sages, learning restraint the hard way, which sits uncomfortably alongside his reputation. And there are stories that turn on ordinary human choices, carrying the same weight as the mythological ones.
The book's argument, implicit in its selection, is that these stories do not belong only to scholars. They carry a consistent proposition: that humans are more capable of shaping their own destinies than they usually believe, and that the bad and the good arrive together and must be held together. Ajitsaria writes for readers encountering the Puranas for the first time and for those who know them well, without condescending to either.
For young adults and families looking for stories that carry cultural and philosophical depth without requiring prior knowledge, this is a well-judged entry into a tradition several thousand years deep.
In these handpicked stories from various Puranas, folktales and other renditions, Author Kanupriya Ajitsaria, traverses a vast span across the four yugas, through various lands and the protagonists belonging to various age groups. If they speak of the Godly incarnations, they also tell the lineage of the most famous Raakshasa, Raavan. These stories tell you how even the greatest saints, like Vasishtha, had to learn and practice restraint the hard way. Simple yet profound, they show that we, as humans, are immensely powerful and capable of defining our destiny. And we have to embrace the bad along with the good. These stories are bound to thrill the novice and the learned alike. For the novice, they'll open the door to vast treasures of Indian history and culture, and for the learned, they'll provide some fresh perspectives.
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