The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India (Suny Series in Hindu Studies) [Paperback]

Pingali Surana (Author), Velceru Narayanaravu (Contributor), David Dean Shulman (Contributor)

Book Description

Series: Suny Series in Hindu Studies | Publication Date: March 16, 2006

This sixteenth-century work has a modern sensibility, presenting characters' inner worlds and understanding love as the fullest realization of the individual.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The Demon's Daughter (Prabhavati-pradyumnamu) is a sixteenth-century novel by the south Indian poet Pingali Suranna, originally written in Telugu, the language of present-day Andhra Pradesh. Suranna begins with a story from classical Hindu mythology in which a demon plans to overthrow the gods. Krishna's son Pradyumna is sent to foil the plot and must infiltrate the impregnable city of the demons; Krishna helps ensure his success by having a matchmaking goose cause Pradyumna to fall in love with the demon's daughter. The original story focuses on the ongoing war between gods and anti-gods, but Pingali Suranna makes it an exploration of the experience of being and falling in love. In this, the work evinces a modern sensibility, showing love as both an individualized emotion and the fullest realization of a person, transcending social and cultural barriers.

The translators include an afterword that explores the cultural setting of the work and its historical and literary contexts. Anyone interested in the literature and mythology of India will find this book compelling, but all readers who love a good story will enjoy this moving book. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman have provided an elegant translation that will serve well the contemporary reader who wishes to encounter a masterwork of world literature largely unknown in the West.

"This is an eminently readable translation of an outstanding work of the late sixteenth-century Telugu literature. The text itself is a highly engaging work that is readily accessible to the contemporary English-speaking reader. It is also of considerable significance for the light it appears to shed on the nature of social and historical changes in late sixteenth-century south India." — Phillip B. Wagoner, coauthor of Vijayanagara: Architectural Inventory of the Sacred Centre --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Velcheru Narayana Rao is Krishnadevaraya Professor of Languages and Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. David Shulman is Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. They are the co-translators of The Sound of the Kiss, or The Story That Must Never Be Told by Pingali Suranna and God on The Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati by Annamayya. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press; annotated edition edition (March 16, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791466965
• ISBN-13: 978-0791466964
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,264,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sensual and accessible, May 1, 2011

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Rachelphoenix - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India (Suny Series in Hindu Studies) (Paperback)

"In a voice mellifluous as a gentle shower of honey, without faltering, without throwing in filler words, very gracefully, the goose made a highly learned presentation. [...] She also demonstrated her proficiency in poetry, dramaturgy, poetics, music, and erotic science."

The goose Sucimukhi was taught by Saraswati, Goddess of Learning and Speech, and given the title "Mother of Similes and Hyperbole." In this gorgeous, witty, sensual fifteenth-century novel from south India, she helps resolve a war in Heaven by match-making between Pradyumna, Krishna's son, and Prabhavati, the daughter of a demon king.

If you skim the genealogies at the very beginning, you don't need to already have a background in Indian myth and religion to appreciate this short novel, which can be enjoyed on many levels: as a love story told in luscious, Song of Solomon-like metaphors; as a love story punctuated by metafictional commentary and sly parodies of the overblown conventions of love stories; as myth; as a small taste of a literary culture that I suspect most of you haven't encountered before. (I mean fifteenth century Telegu literature, not Indian literature in general.)

Unlike a lot of literature which was clearly hot at the time but not to modern readers' erotic tastes... this is still hot. At least, I thought so. There are many more explicit passages, but I was particularly taken with this one, in which Prabhvati's girlfriend helps her arrange her hair for her first meeting with her beloved, and breaks into spontaneous poetry:

If you let your hair down, you look beautiful.
When you let it hang halfway, you look beautiful, too.
If it gets tangled, you're beautiful in a different way.
If you comb it down, even more so.
You can braid it, roll it into a bun, or better still
tie it into a knot on the side.
You're beautiful with that hair every which way.

It's long, black, and so thick
you can't hold it in one hand.
No matter how you wear it,
you'll trap your husband with your hair.