Reading Notes: Raja Rasalu, Part A

Reading through Raja Rasalu's Part A stories, wondering what kind of changes I could make, I came across "How He Killed the Giants" and got the idea of doing a western adaptation. In "How He Killed the Giants," Raja Rasalu comes upon a village where an old woman explains to him how they are being forced to pay tribute to a group of giants. Long story short, Raja Rasalu goes out with the next tribute and kills the giants, saving the village. This, to me, felt very reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven/The Seven Samurai, and I am considering retelling that story as a cowboy tale.

As I continued reading, however, I found another set of stories equally suitable to a western retelling. Stories 6-10 of Part A tell of Raja Rasalu's journey to play dice with a distant king. For the sake of word count (and retellability as a western), were I to retell these stories I would only use the first and last of them: "The Dice and the Cricket" and "How He Played Chaupur with King Sarkap." In the first of these stories, Raja Rasalu is forced to seek refuge from a storm in a graveyard. Here he converses with a headless corpse, a victim of King Sarkap, who gives him a set of enchanted bone dice to use in his match with the king. He also saves a cricket but that is not relevant to the retelling. In the second of these stories, as the title suggests, Raja Rasalu has his dice match with King Sarkap, defeating him with the use of the corpse's enchanted dice. A western retelling could see Raja Rasalu as an outlaw, tired of running, on his way to gamble for his freedom with the corrupt sheriff out to get him.

The Magnificent Seven (1960). Source: Flickr

Story Source:

Tales of the Punjab by Flora Annie Steel