Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides (World Literature in Translation)

"Brave and vivid."— New York Review of Books These enchanting stories from early modern Bengal reveal how Hindu and Muslim traditions converged on timeless themes of human morality, social culture, and survival. The Bengali stories in this collection are first and foremost tales of survival. Each story in Needle at the Bottom of the Sea underscores the need for people to work together—not just to overcome the challenges of living in the Sundarban swamps of Bengal, but also to ease hostilities born of social differences in religion, caste, and economic class. Translated by award-winning scholar of early modern Bengali literature Tony K. Stewart, Needle at the Bottom of the Sea brims with fantasy and excitement. Sufi protagonists travel through a world of wonder where tigers talk and men magically grow into giants, a Hindu princess falls in love with a Muslim holy man, and goddesses rub shoulders with kings and merchants. Across religion, class, and gender, what binds these fabulous stories together is the characters' pursuit of living honorably and morally in a difficult, corrupt world. "What would you do if that white fly buzzing around your head landed on the wall and started giving you marriage advice? Or what could possibly be your response if the mendicant Sufi you often see at prayers should in the blink of an eye shapeshift into a giant ogre, enormous fangs bulging from a bloody maw? These events, and many more like them are not uncommon in the stories (kathās) of miracle-working Sufi saints (pīrs) that have circulated in the Bangla-speaking world for most of the last millennium. The stories are romances filled with wondrous marvels where tigers talk, rocks float and waters part, and færies carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of fate, Bidhātā, has ordained marriage. Each of the five stories in this anthology feature unlikely heroes and heroines, intrepid ocean-going traders, fickle gods and goddesses, prophets and holy men, and the royal whimsy of kings and zamindars. The protagonists encounter predicaments faced by every human being, but the presence of marvels beyond the ordinary signal creative solutions that are magnified to heroic scale. They revel in the skillful navigation of the quirks of everyday life, adroitly maneuvering through the obligations of pressing kinship, juggling the tensions of conflicting allegiances, cleverly satisfying competing social and religious demands which are inevitably political. While the protagonists are nominally religious, Sufi saints, both men and women, the texts are in no way sectarian statements or theology. They are literature, adventure stories of survival that underscore the necessity of people from all social and religious ranks to work together in hostile environments. They explore ways to overcome the physical challenges of living in the Sundarban mangrove swamps of southern Bengal which are rife with natural resources but teeming with myriad tigers, crocodiles, and dread diseases; and to ameliorate the occasional hostilities born of social differences of caste and economic class"-- Provided by publisher