Nala and Damayanti
The Mahabharata, a huge work of over 100,000 double verses, contains a large number of side episodes, some of which are nested within one another, in addition to the main story, which tells of the battle between the Pandavas and Kauravas, two related princely families.
Alongside the religious-philosophical didactic poem Bhagavad Gita and the Savitri legend, Nala and Damayanti is one of the best known of these episodes.
Reluctantly, the king of Nishadha has to court the gods with Damayanti, whom he desires, but she confesses her love for Nala and vows to choose him as her husband.
At the self-choice ceremony, Indra, Agni, Varuna and Yama try to outwit Bhima's daughter by assuming Nala's form, but she so fervently implores her love for the Nishadha king that the gods relent and reveal themselves.
Tempted by the demon Kali, who still lives inside him, Nala leaves his wife secretly at night with a heavy heart.
After surviving many dangers and wailing through the forest, Damayanti joins a caravan and, after further adventures, reaches the land of Chedi, where she is taken in unrecognized by the Queen Mother at court.
By abandoning his wife, who is entitled to care and protection, the king violates the commandment of "law and custom" (dharma) - a concept that plays a central role in Indian thought.
"[3] Nala's violation of dharma, however, allows the poet to portray Damayanti as the embodiment of the blameless wife who remains faithful to her husband even when he treats her unjustly.
The second main motif - the loss of possessions in a game of dice - also appears several times in Indian literature: in addition to the story of Nala, it also occurs in the main plot of the Mahabharata (with which the Nala episode is set in analogy) and is also found in the "Song of Dice"[5] in the Rigveda, the oldest work of Indian literature.
The uniformity of content and structure shows Nala and Damayanti to be originally independent heroic poetry and remnants of an old bardic tradition.
The epic was compiled between 400 BC and 400 AD, but the material used may be much older and partly depicts circumstances of the Vedic period (ca.
According to this, he could have been a king who lived at that time and undertook war campaigns to the south, which in turn points to the great age of the Nala legend.
Indian Kavya art poetry, which experienced a golden age in the 1st millennium AD., made use of well-known mythological material to embellish it artistically.
The tale is also infinitely popular in India, ... there the heroic loyalty and devotion of Damayantī is as famous as that of Penelope among us; and in Europe, the gathering-place of the products of all parts and ages of the world, it deserves to be so too.
"[14]Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who showed great interest in Indian literature, was also interested in Nala and Damayanti and wrote about them in his daily and annual journals in 1821:"I also studied Nala with admiration and only regretted that our sensibilities, customs and way of thinking had developed so differently from those of that Eastern nation that such an important work would only attract a few among us, perhaps only specialist readers.
Nala and Damayanti has been translated into at least ten European languages (German, English, French, Italian, Swedish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Modern Greek and Hungarian).
[16] The Italian poet and Orientalist Angelo De Gubernatis created a stage adaptation of the material (Il re Nala, 1869).
To this day, Nala and Damayanti is traditionally the preferred beginning reading for students of Sanskrit at Western universities because of its beauty and the simplicity of the language.
In the second half of the 20th century, historians of mathematics began to look at references to stochastic ideas in ancient India, especially the game of dice, which appears in many stories.
According to the story, the reason he wins back his lost kingdom in the second dice game is that he was able to successfully apply the knowledge he learned from King Rituparna.
University Press, Oxford 1860 (digitized version in the Internet Archive) Charles Rockwell Lanman: A Sanskrit Reader: with vocabulary and notes.
