Kathasaritsagara

The Kathasaritsagara, meaning Ocean of the Streams of Story, is a large collection of Indian legends, fairy tales and folk tales retold in Sanskrit verse by Somadeva, a Shaivite writer from Kashmir, in the eleventh century, around 1070 CE. Composed as an elaborate frame narrative, it contains multiple embedded layers of story within story, gathering material that had circulated earlier in oral and written form into a single sprawling compilation. Somadeva presents his own work as a retelling drawn from an earlier, now largely lost body of legend, and the Kathasaritsagara has become one of the most important surviving repositories of classical Indian narrative literature, valued both for the individual tales it preserves and for its influence on the study of the frame-narrative technique across South Asian and world storytelling traditions.