India’s much-loved and bestselling author Sudha Murty is back and she’s going to take you on an empowering journey with her newest book The Daughter From A Wishing Tree.
The book features yarns with remarkable women who will remind you of the strong female influences in your life.
Here’s an excerpt from the book where Sudha Murty tells us a little bit about the book:
When I decided to write a book about women in mythology, I began my research and soon felt disappointed and disillusioned. I found that there is minimal literature that highlights the important roles that women have played. The most popular of these women are, without a doubt, Draupadi from the Mahabharata and Sita from the Ramayana, and then there’s Parvati, who portrays a strong character of a goddess well-versed in the art of slaying demons and protecting her devotees. In fact, many rivers in our country are considered to be goddesses. However, the number of stories that abound about these women is strangely far fewer than the number of stories that speak about men. The literature that does exist is frequently repetitive and women are usually cast as subordinate or minor characters and remain underappreciated.
Perhaps this is because our society has traditionally been a male-dominated one, or because mythology has been written mostly by men, but most likely, it is a combination of these two reasons.
A popular sloka goes:
Yatra naryastu pujyante
Ramante tatra Devata
It means that god resides wherever women are respected. However, if you look with sensitivity at the world around us, you will find that this is usually not true—whether you are a woman or a goddess. This is why I have, through this book, tried my best to retell stories that I grew up listening to and reading over the years, in an attempt to bring out the lives of some powerful women.
These stories have several recurring mythological figures that have featured in the previous three books in this series:The Serpent’s Revenge: Unusual Tales from the Mahabharata; The Man from the Egg: Unusual Tales about the Trinity; and The Upside-Down King: Unusual Tales about Rama and Krishna. Readers can refer to these if they’d like to know more about certain characters that appear in this book.
I would like to thank my long-time and dear editor Shrutkeerti Khurana, and my wonderful support group at Penguin including Sohini Mitra, Arpita Nath and Piya Kapur.
My loved reader, I hope that you will enjoy these stories.
Has Sudha Murty’s letter has inspired you to grab a copy? The Daughter From A Wishing Tree is available now!
