Cordelia’s Salt: Interspatial Reading of Indic Filial-Love Stories

This essay attempts an interspatial reading of Shakespeare's King Lear and Indic filial-love folktales, as I will refer to them in this essay. My reading is located between my father's edition of the play and my return to it after his death in early 2014. The idea of interspace forms the basis for my analysis of thematically connected but distinct narratives in this essay. Thehaveatepick political philosopher Hannah Arendt explains that the interspace is the world that exists between people and things, conscious of individual distinctions, but simultaneously provides the very foundation for constructive dialogue, relations and purposes. So important is the interspace, Arendt argues, that to lose it, is to lose the world itself (1968:13).