Introduction

If these walls could talk, oh the stories they would tell.

Stories that cross the heavens and traverse the earth.

Stories of love and loss, of following destiny, and of overcoming immense difficulties.

These walls tell the stories of women who bridge the gap between the realms of worldly and divine,

at home in neither and yet affected by both.

I began this Storybook Project wanting to discover stories. To find the cracks in ancient tales, peer inside them, and give a voice to what was found there. In my readings, I came across tales of the apsaras: beautiful, youthful women who were sent by the gods to entertain, seduce, and distract holy men from their meditations. In all these tales, the listener is regaled with the obstacles these women faced and how they overcame them, but never from the perspective of the women themselves. We never know their thoughts and emotions, desires and motivations; we only know their stories.

I want to instead offer entire pictures of who these women really were. I want them to speak to you of what they lived through so you may see these ancient tales from their point of view. In this Storybook Project, I offer the tales of Menaka, Tilottama, and Rambha in their own voices.

Menaka was sent by Indra to seduce the sage Vishwamitra and break his meditation. However, after she successfully interrupted his meditations, Menaka fell in love with the sage and bore him a child. When Vishwamitra realized that Indra had sent the apsara to distract him, he banished Menaka and cursed her to be separated from him forever, even though he had also fallen in love. How did Menaka overcome this separation from her beloved? Was she angry at Vishwamitra for putting his pride before his love of her? How would she now provide for her child?

Tilottama is considered the most beautiful of the apsaras, created by Vishwakarma out of the best qualities of everything. Story after story extols her beauty and how she was the enchantress of demon and god alike, but while all desire her, what does she desire? Does she long for adventure? Or does she only wish to be more than a pretty face and to give her heart completely to one man?

Rambha is the beloved wife of Nalakuvara, but on her way to meet her husband, she was captured and raped by Ravana. When Nalakuvara discovered his wife and learned of how Ravana violated her, he cursed Ravana to die if he ever assaulted another woman. While Rambha is glad that other woman will be spared from Ravana, how will she overcome what happened to her? Will she find the peace her troubled heart deserves?

I have paired each of these narratives with cave paintings of apsaras from Sigiriya, an ancient rock fortress in Sri Lanka, to tie these retellings back to the tales they come from. While centuries span between their lives and ours, I hope the situations and emotions experienced by these three women might speak to the problems we still face today.

Image Information: A picture of a cave wall, upon which multiple paintings of apsaras are featured. (Wikimedia Commons)