Needle at the Bottom of the Sea - (World Literature in Translation) by Tony K Stewart (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 (kathåas) of miracle-working Sufi saints (påirs) 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 fµries carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of fate, Bidhåatåa, 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"--

Book Synopsis

"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.

From the Back Cover

"Access Bengal's secret heart through this wondrous book. Travel deep into the forest and peek beyond the delta's edge: balancing scholarly rigor with storytelling elan, Tony Stewart's tidal tales with their fantastic cast of boundary-crossing characters shed unexpected and much-needed light on the relationship between Bengal, Islam, and the Indian Ocean world."--Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Infosys Prize winner and author, Partition's Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia

"These subtly analyzed and beautifully translated tales represent a major accomplishment, revealing a sophisticated understanding of interreligious and intercaste relations in the register of the marvelous."--Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford

Review Quotes

"Needle at the Bottom of the Sea allows access to local stories of quotidian struggles of common people and their belief system. The kathas in this anthology are useful for locating the time and space in South Asian history that led to the incorporation of Islamic cultural strands into the socio-literary corpus of Bengali. The translation of these tales entailed meticulous research. . . . Overall, this is a work of great scholarship, which will interest literary historians as well as avid readers having interest in traditional South Asian romances."-- "Asian Review of Books"

"Brave and vivid . . . [Stewart's translation] helps the anglophone reader enter this world in which karma supplies the ultimate explanation of the often bizarre adventures of the human spirit so richly explored in these stories."--Wendy Doniger "The New York Review of Books"

About the Author

Tony K. Stewart is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University and a specialist in the early modern literatures of the Bengali-speaking world. His most recent work is Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination, winner of the 2021 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.