Vetaal and Vikram: Riddles of the Undead

’This riddle can end in two ways: speech and defeat, or silence and death.’

Vetaal and Vikram is a playful retelling of one of India’s most celebrated cycles of stories. The narrative of King Vikram and the Vetaal is located within the Kathasaritsagara, an eleventh-century Sanskrit text. The Vetaal who is neither living nor dead is a consummate storyteller, and Vikram is a listener who can neither speak nor stay silent. Together they are destined to walk a labyrinth of stories in the course of a moonless night in a cremation ground.

In 1870, eleven of the Vetaal’s stories were adapted to English by the famed scholar-explorer Richard Francis Burton who tailored them to his audience’s gothic taste. Vetaal and Vikram is a contemporary response that includes Burton within its storytelling folds.

Fantastical and delightful, this retelling dissolves the lines between speaker and listener, desire and duty, life and death.

Gayathri Prabhu is the author of the memoir If I Had to Tell It Again, and the novels The Untitled, Birdswim Fishfly and Maya. She is the recipient of the RK Narayan award (2019) and teaches literary studies at the Manipal Centre for Humanities.