The illustrations that head each chapter of Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India by Roberto Calasso (Knopf, $27.50) reveal a lot about this idiosyncratic retelling of Indian mythology and theology. The images don't come directly from the vast treasury of Indian religious art; they're European redrawings of Indian motifs, culled from books published in Leiden and Paris and London in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. All are products of a European fascination with India that began about the time the Dutch, French, and British empires reached the Indies. And like his pictures, Calasso's text is an unstable mixture of Indian content and European perspective.

Europe's Indomania--chronicled brilliantly by the French man of letters Raymond Schwab in The Oriental Renaissance--reached from the salons of prerevolutionary France to the university towns that birthed German romanticism to the Concord of Thoreau and Emerson. From there, of course, it would influence American popular culture via turn-of-the-century occultism and the sitar-driven 1960s. Along the way it gave birth to serious poetry, philosophy, and scholarship (Schwab holds that romanticism would have been impossible without the influence of India on German thinkers) as well as nutty faddism.

So Calasso's Indian excursion comes with a respectable pedigree. Like his well-received recasting of Greek mythology, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1993), it doesn't systematize, organize, or "make clear" mythological structure; it just thrusts us into the stories. When the great god Shiva's consort Parvati flames with jealousy because the maiden Ganga (who is also the Ganges River) insists on flowing sexily through Shiva's hair, we're eavesdroppers on a nasty squabble: "'Who is that damn woman hiding in your hair?' said Parvati. 'The sickle moon,' said Shiva, as though thinking of something else. 'I'm not speaking about the moon, I'm speaking about your girlfriend,' said Parvati, snarling."

Although here and elsewhere Calasso's (or translator Tim Parks') ear for the colloquial is a little on the wooden side, this kind of tabloid intimacy with the deities is enjoyable--and solidly within the Indian tradition. The loves of the gods are at once sublime metaphysical principles, religious truths, and beloved stories replayed in cheesy films and TV shows.