A Cultural Encyclopaedia of the Kathāsaritsāgara in Keywords

A Cultural Encyclopaedia of the Kathāsaritsāgara in Keywords For the entertainment of the unhappy queen Sūryavatī, the Śaiva Brahmin Somadeva, court poet of king Ananta of Kashmir, composed during the years between 1063 and 1081 AD a Sanskrit version of the Bṛhatkathā of Guṇāḍhya, a long, nested tale in the Paiśācī dialect of northern India. Well-known through a ten-volumed annotated English translation (1924–28), the “Ocean of Story” (Kathāsaritsāgara) shows the gamut of cultural life. This valuable data cannot be fully exploited by the variable and incomplete index of Vol.X of Tawney’s and Penzer’s admirable work. With the present, new index of the Sanskrit text, the retired Heidelberg scholar Prof. Willem Bollée wishes to fill a gap for fellow Indologists and cultural experts from other disciplines as well as for Social Anthropologists. This is to be achieved by working out the wealth of cultural information contained in the Kathāsaritsāgara, and also demonstrating how a useful cultural history index of Epics, Purāṇas, Jātakas, etc., could look, with a view to suggesting promising topics for further research.