<p>This article is a study of religious discourse from Gujarat on fortitude and the instructional process within literature that makes legendary figures into intelligible metaphors for exemplary devotional approaches to hardships. It traces the religious appeal and significance of fortitude through a close reading of selected Gujarati Nala-Damayantī stories and a sustained engagement with the nineteenth-century verse-text <i>Dhirajākhyān</i> (The Story of Fortitude), which also includes the couple’s story. The Gujarati poets use narrative strategies in telling stories of figures with established notability within a local consciousness to redirect their audience’s attention from the recognizable characters and plots toward specific Jain or Hindu instructions and exemplars. Through their telling of Nala and Damayantī’s hardship, they reassess hardship as an unavoidable ubiquitous experience, suffering as resulting from perspectives that keep one mired in the material world, and fortitude as resulting from alternate perspectives constituting a religiously significant practice to actualize the self-becoming that leads to liberation.</p>