Śukasaptati

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Synopsis

Śukasaptati, or Seventy tales of the parrot, is a collection of stories originally written in Sanskrit. The stories are supposed to be narrated to a woman by her pet parrot, at the rate of one story every night, in order to dissuade her from going out to meet her paramour when her husband is away. The stories frequently deal with illicit liaisons, the problems that flow from them and the way to escape those crises by using one's wits. Though the actual purpose of the parrot is to prevent its mistress from leaving, it does so without moralising. At the end of the seventy days, the woman's husband returns from his trip abroad and all is forgiven. Most of the stories are ribald and uninhibited, with some verging on the pornographic. The situations depicted in the stories not only test the bounds of marriage, some stray into taboo areas of incest and, in one case, zoophilia.

Text license: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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Type: Book