Learning about the Other: The Cave of Echoes swims with own pair of fins

The Cave of Echoes: Stories about Gods, Animals and Other Strangers

By Wendy Doniger

Published by Speaking Tiger

225 pages  ₹599

  The impulse to tell a good story is universal and eternal. Nomadic hordes, early settlers, kings, and commoners — everyone has always loved a good yarn. Myths and folktales that survive to this day were the elixir the ancient world sipped. These stories that the ancients once told still burn bright, holding large crowds in thrall, churning up new ideas, and driving new discoveries about early human existence. 

How does one explain their timeless power? 

Several writers have written eloquently on the subject (A K Ramanujan, Mircea Eliade, Karen Armstrong, Joseph Campbell, and, of course, the author of this book, Wendy Doniger) and their work has illuminated much of our modern-day understanding of these stories as a priceless, collective inheritance. The Cave of Echoes: Stories about Gods, Animals and Other Strangers swims in the same ocean of stories but uses a different pair of fins. It focuses not on the stories per se, but on the stories around these stories and asks readers to rethink established ideas about diversity, culture, and the ‘other’. 

The book operates much like a magic mirror where the glass reflects, not the object, but the viewer’s gaze on the object. Like much of Doniger’s earlier work, it draws parallels between cultures and tracks the nuances that separate one myth from another, but the aim is to demonstrate how all myths help understand the world better. 

For instance, there is a delightful story that the book recounts about the Mahabharata and its retelling. The Jaina acharya, Hemachandra (12th century CE), who was extremely popular at the time and was known to attract large crowds wherever he went, told the story of the Mahabharata at several gatherings. Every time his story ended with the Pandavas becoming Jaina monks at the end of their lives. This angered the Brahmins in one of the kingdoms where he had preached thus and they complained to the king. Low-caste preachers had desecrated the smritis, they said. (Ancient Indian literature makes a distinction between smriti (as remembered) and shruti (as heard) texts; the Mahabharata is a smriti text as opposed to the Vedas that are shruti texts.) In Vyasa’s composition, the Pandavas had all gone to heaven after propitiating Shiva, and the 

truth was being compromised in the retelling. 

When Hemachandra was summoned, he answered with a question: Were the Brahmins sure that the Pandavas who had become Jaina sages in his story were the same as those mentioned by Vyasa? There are many Pandavas and he was not referring to ones that Vyasa had written about. To emphasise his point, he quoted a story from Vyasa’s Mahabharata: Bhishma’s last wish had been that he be cremated in a place where no pyre had burnt before. His followers struggled to find one and when they had finally discovered a remote spot at the top of a hill, they were informed by a divine voice that a hundred Bhishmas had been cremated here, 300 Pandavas and 1,000 Dronacharyas; as for Karna, there were too many to keep count.

Knowledge, Hemachandra told the king, is no one’s paternal property. It is like the Ganga, it flows and it can be gathered from any source. Both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have been retold countless times; AK Ramanujan and Paula Richman, among others, have written extensively about how the Ramayana has been adapted and retold. 

These stories have also become a part of the lexicon — supportive siblings are often labelled Lakshman while an ideal wife is Sita, and so on. 

Plurality and fluidity, hallmarks of all oral traditions, gave wings to the ancient stories. They amplified the voice of the characters and the storytellers without threatening the relevance and integrity of the story. And there hangs a lesson: “The fear that we will lose our own way, our own voice by being swallowed up in the maelstrom of relativism is a paranoid one,” Doniger writes. Just as the stories about the stories indicate, there is a lot to gain by listening to different versions and creating new ways to interpret a given tale. 

Understanding other people’s myths can be empowering, too. The book examines the myths of Shiva and Daksha from Indian mythology and Dionysus from the Greek world to unpack the meaning of sacrifice, relationships, and divinity. The stories emerge from different contexts and compulsions but they address common problems. 

Doniger weaves in stories from Indian, Greek, Jewish, and other mythologies in the book to highlight the ideas they carry, and she writes: “There is a treasure for us to find in other people’s myths.” 

This is the song that plays out throughout the book — other people’s cultures and stories can help us know our own. Too often, today, myths are used as identity cards to validate the antiquity of a nation or a cultural group. But that was never their function. Mythology was born out of a desire to understand the world better, and this book reminds readers that it can still serve that purpose. 

The reviewer is a Mumbai-based journalist and co-founder of The Mythology Project, a centre for the study of mythology, legends, and folklore