From the epics
Stories from the Indian astrological tradition.
Hand-curated stories from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Bhagavata Purana, Padma Purana, Skanda Purana, Buddhist Jataka tales, the Tamil Sangam corpus, and oral folk traditions of Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra. Each story sourced to a specific text. Five to ten minutes per story. Every translation is hand-authored.
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Pl. IRamayana
Ahalya, and the long wait that ended when Rama came
A sage's curse leaves Ahalya unseen for an age, until a boy walking to Mithila sets his foot in the dust of an empty hermitage.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/8 min/Adults
Krishna lifts Mount Govardhan, India, 17th c.
Pl. IIRamayana
Jatayu: The Old Vulture Who Fought Ravana Alone
Ravana is carrying Sita south in a flying chariot, and the one witness on the road is a vulture sixty thousand years old, a friend of Rama's dead father. He knows exactly how a fight between an old bird and the king of Lanka ends, and he offers it anyway. What he wins is not the fight. It is a direction, held on to until Rama arrives, and a funeral fit for a king.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/8 min/All ages
Sudāmā at the glimpse of Krishna’s palace, Pahari, c.1775
Pl. IIIRamayana
Trishanku: The King Who Hangs Between Heaven and Earth
King Satyavrata wanted to enter heaven in his living body. His guru refused, his guru's sons cursed him, and the rival sage Vishvamitra burned centuries of tapas to force the door. Heaven threw him back, the sage stopped his fall, and he hangs head down between the worlds still.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/8 min/All ages
The Battle at Lanka, Sahibdin, Mewar, 1649 to 1653
Pl. IVRamayana
The king who spent his whole life bringing a river down for people he had never met
Sixty thousand princes went digging for a stolen horse, accused the wrong man, and came back as a heap of ash. Only the water of a river that was still up in the sky could release them. It took three kings who failed and a fourth who would not stop standing there.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/4 min/Children
The marriage of Rama and Sita, Shangri Ramayana, c.1700
Pl. VRamayana
Shravan Kumar: The Son Who Carried His Parents
A devoted son bears his blind aged parents on a shoulder-pole toward the holy places, until a king's arrow loosed in the dark turns their pilgrimage into grief and a curse.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/6 min/All ages
Bhishma on his bed of arrows, Razmnama, 1761 to 1763
Pl. VIRamayana
What Mandodari said to Ravana on the night before his death
On the last night of the war, Ravana came to his queen Mandodari's chamber. She had not spoken to him in three weeks. That night, she did. The argument she made, quietly, without raising her voice once, was the closest thing to a final mercy the great king ever received.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/8 min/Adults
Krishna and Arjuna on the chariot, India, 18th to 19th c.
Pl. VIIRamayana
The headless monster in the forest who pointed Rama to Sugriva
Deep in the Dandaka forest lived a monster with no head, his face set in his belly, his arms eight miles long. He caught Rama and Lakshmana in a single embrace. What he asked them to do, and what he had been before, is one of the strangest redemption stories in the Ramayana.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/7 min/All ages
Krishna lifts Mount Govardhan, India, 17th c.
Pl. VIIIRamayana
The rakshasi who dreamed of Rama's victory before the war began
In the Ashoka grove where Sita was held, an old rakshasi woman named Trijata woke trembling from a dream, and told the other guards exactly how Lanka would burn. The other women laughed at first. By morning they were begging Sita's forgiveness.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/5 min/All ages
Sudāmā at the glimpse of Krishna’s palace, Pahari, c.1775
Pl. IXRamayana
The tribal woman who tasted each berry before offering it to Rama
Shabari was an old, low-caste forest woman who waited her whole life to meet Rama. When he finally came, she did something that should have been ritually unthinkable: she tasted each berry herself before offering it. Rama smiled and ate them all.
Vidhata Editorial Desk/6 min/All ages
The Battle at Lanka, Sahibdin, Mewar, 1649 to 1653