Somadeva

"The Red Lotus of Chastity" paints the picture of a moral atmosphere accepting of deception and intrigue as a practical habit. The heroine, Devasmita, instinctively employs the deceptive arts to secure her happy ending, to the approving hearty laughter of king and all.

Devasmita looks to stories of past deceptions for precedent and encouragement in intrigue. The motif of the heroine in disguise serving to hoodwink a male authority seems to suggest the greater wit and cunning of the feminine mind. It may also imply a general distrust for feminine wiles. But taking into account Somadeva's patron queen, Suryamati of Kashmir, for whom he composed the bulky compendium of tales (and tales within tales), the motive of the author is clear: He sought to entertain his queen with agreeable conceits centering on the aggrandizement of feminine prowess in intrigue. One can imagine the queen satisfactorily entertained by the quick wit and strategic thinking, and edified by the devotion and constancy, of the heroine Devasmita.

The general ambience and thematic content of the work speak more to the relation of author and patron than to broad-brush male-female, culturally contextualized interactions, in my view. What the composition has to say about its cultural locus can hardly be pinpointed without extensive research into the character of patron and poet and male-female politics of the age and queendom.

Work Cited

Somadeva. "From Kathasaritsagara." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 1274-1279. Print.