ABSTRACT
This chapter maps the journey of an eleventh-century Indian prose narrative, the Twenty-Five Tales of the Vetala, across time and space – from the first extant Sanskrit manuscripts to twenty-first-century adaptations from around the world. Following Franco Moretti’s methodology of distant reading, this chapter uses maps to chart the distribution of the Vetala narrative and its adaptations to make visible global flows. This cartographic visualization of cultural entanglements reveals the distribution of adaptations diachronically as well as synchronically and challenges the center/periphery relationship in which India sits on the margins of an assumed dominant cultural Western sphere. The global movement of the Vetala Tales illustrates the fluidity of narrative and the multidirectional permeability of cultural spheres. By generating cartographic material, which visualizes spatial patterns of concentration, diffusion, and movement around the world, this chapter establishes a geography of adaptation that shows how the global flow of narratives started long before the current stage of globalization.
