Of flying yoginis, Trojan elephants, and kings who ghost their girlfriends

"I do believe that literature is a very important source of knowledge complementary to history, epigraphy and archaeology. It is not easy to read drama at the best of times. It is even more difficult to read Sanskrit drama because it is quite out of the ordinary! But there is a lot of timelessness in these plays, however strange they may seem with their tigers, elephants and tantriks! The human elements are the ones we still completely recognize - love, jealousy and ambition. We haven't changed; we are laughing at the same things that people 2000 years ago were laughing at! One of the criteria for choosing the plays was that all the great playwrights had to be represented. And I didn't want to use plays based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata because we already know those stories. This is a book about introducing different narratives to a lay public. Also, I wanted people to be aware that the millennium of classical Sanskrit drama does not come out of a Hindu universe alone. It comes out of a universe of political diversity, cultural diversity, religious diversity. But it's true that it is also a common universe however much people might have different ideologies and different religions; there are social mores that hold them all together" - Arshia Sattar, author, Vasanta; Stories from Sanskrit Plays talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about ancient plays like Shudraka's Mricchakatika ( The Little Clay Cart), Mahendravarman's The Holy Man and the Courtesan, and Harsha's Nagananda, among others, that continue to appeal to us