KRISHNA CORIOLIS#1: Slayer of Kamsa

Ashok Kumar Banker’s internationally acclaimed
Ramayana Series®
has been hailed as a ‘milestone’ (
India
Today)
and a ‘magnificently rendered labour of love’ (
Outlook
). It is arguably the most popular English-language retelling of the ancient Sanskrit epic. His work has been published in 56 countries, a dozen languages, several hundred reprint editions with over 1.2 million copies of his books currently in print.

Born of mixed parentage, Ashok was raised without any caste or religion, giving him a uniquely post-racial and post-religious Indian perspective. Even through successful careers in marketing, advertising, journalism and scriptwriting, Ashok retained his childhood fascination with the ancient literature of India. With the
Ramayana Series®
he embarked on a massively ambitious publishing project he calls the Epic India Library. The EI Library comprises Four Wheels: Mythology, Itihasa, History, and Future History. The
Ramayana Series®
and
Krishna Coriolis
are part of the First Wheel. The
Mahabharata Series
is part of the Second Wheel.
Ten Kings
and the subsequent novels in the Itihasa Series dealing with different periods of recorded Indian history are the Third Wheel. Novels such as
Vertigo, Gods of War, The Kali Quartet, Saffron White Green
are the Fourth Wheel.

He is one of the few living Indian authors whose contribution to Indian literature is acknowledged in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Writing and The Vintage Anthology of Indian Literature. His writing is used as a teaching aid in several management and educational courses worldwide and has been the subject of several dissertations and theses.

Ashok is 48 years old and lives with his family in Mumbai. He is always accessible to his readers at www.ashokbanker.com—over 35,000 have corresponded with him to date. He looks forward to hearing from you.

SLAYER OF KAMSA

Ashok K
.
Banker

KRISHNA CORIOLIS

Book
1

AKB eBOOKS

For Biki and Bithika:

My Radha and my Rukmini.

For Yashka and Ayush Yoda:

My Yashoda.

All you faithful readers

who understand

that these tales

are not about being Hindu

or even about being Indian.

They're simply about
being
.

In that spirit,

I dedicate this gita-govinda

to the krishnachild in all of us.

For, under these countless

separate skins, there beats

a single eternal heart.

Author’s Preface to the first Indian print edition 2010

If it takes a community to raise a child, then it surely takes a nation to build an epic.

The itihasa of the subcontinent belongs to no single person. The great epics of our culture – of any culture – may be told and retold infinite times by innumerable poets and writers; yet, no single version is the final one.

The wonderful adventures of the great Lord Krishna are greater than what any story, edition or retelling can possibly encompass. The lila of God Incarnate is beyond the complete comprehension of any one person. We may each perceive some aspects of His greatness, but, like the blind men and the elephant, none of us can ever see everything at once.

It matters not whether you are Hindu or non- Hindu, whether you believe Krishna to be God or just a great historical personage, whether you are Indian or not. The richness and wonder of these tales have outlived countless generations and will outlast many more to come.

My humble attempt here – within these pages and in the volumes to follow – is neither the best nor the last retelling of this great story. I have no extraordinary talent or ability, no special skill or knowledge, no inner sight or visionary gift. What I
do
have is a lifelong exposure to an itihasa so vast, a culture so rich, a nation so great, wise and ancient, that its influence – permeating into one like water through peat over millennia, filtering through from mind to mind, memory to memory, mother to child and to mother again – has suffused every cell of my being, every unit of my consciousness.

And when I use the word ‘I’, it is meant in the universal.You are‘I’. As I am she.And she is all of us. Krishna’s tale lives through each and every one of us. It is yours to tell. His to tell. Hers to tell. Mine as well. For as long as this tale is told, and retold, it lives on.

I have devoted years to the telling, to the crafting of words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, kaands and volumes. I shall devote more years to come, decades even. Yet all my effort is not mine alone. It is the fruition of a billion Indians, and the billions who have lived before us. For each person who has known this tale and kept it alive in his heart has been a teller, a reteller, a poet, and an author. I am merely the newest name in a long, endless line of names that has had the honour and distinction of being associated with this great story.

It is my good fortune to be the newest reteller of this ancient saga. It is a distinction I share with all who tell and retell this story: from the grandmother who whispers it as a lullaby to the drowsy child, to the scholar who pores over every syllable of every shloka in an attempt to find an insight that has eluded countless scholars before him.

It is a tale told by me in this version, yet it is not my tale alone to tell. It is your story. Our story. Her story. His story.

Accept it in this spirit and with all humility and hope. Also know that I did not create this flame, nor did I light the torch that blazes. I merely bore the torch this far. Now I give it to you. Take it from my hand. Pass it on. As it has passed from hand to hand, mind to mind, voice to voice, for unknown millennia.

Turn the page. See the spark catch flame. Watch Krishna come alive.

Author’s Note to the second Indian print edition 2012

All my books are long in the gestation, some conceived many as thirty-plus years earlier, none less than a decade. It takes me that long to be sure of a story’s longevity and worth and to accumulate the details, notes, research, character development and other tools without which I can’t put my fingers to the keyboard. This particular story, Krishna Coriolis, originated in the same ‘Big Bang’ that was responsible for the creation of my entire Epic India universe – a series of interlinked retellings of all the major myths, legends and itihasa of the Indian subcontinent, set against the backdrop of world history. I’m using the term ‘BigBang’ but in fact it was more of a series of carefully controlled delayed-time explosions
over the first fifteen to eighteen years of my life.

At that time, the Krishna story was a part of the
Sword of Dharma
section of the Epic India library, which retold the ‘dashavatara’ storyline with an unusual twist as well as an integral part of my massively ambitious retelling of the world’s greatest epic, the Mahabharata or the Mba. I began work on my Mba immediately after I completed the Ramayana Series in 2004. After about five years of working on my Mba – a period in which most actual MBA students would be firmly established in their careers! – I realized that the series was too massive to be published as it was. I saw that the Krishna storyline, in particular his individual adventures, could stand on their own as
a separate series. So I separated them into a parallel series which I titled Krishna Coriolis. Naturally, since the story now had to stand on its own, rather than be a part of the larger Mba story, I had to rewrite each book to make it stand on its own, with a reasonably complete beginning, middle and end. This process took another three years, and resulted finally in the form the series now takes. You’re holding the second book of this parallel series in your hands now, titled
Dance of Govinda.

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