In 1989, during a highly successful but all-too-short fishing expedition to the Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC) of the British Library located in the old building on Blackfriars I discovered a trove. When I returned to the University of Chicago, Regenstein Library yielded another small cache of printed materials (to which I added), and I thank both Maureen Patterson and James Nye for their help in locating these. Sequently provided copies of print materials from his extensive private collection of Vaisfinfi ava and popular literature. The bookstalls of College Street were very generous in starting to fill my shelves with this popular literature my good friend and colleague Robert Evans helped me in that endeavor to collect materials in Kolkata, and sub. Department of Education, I discovered many more references to Satya Pı¯r and Satya Na¯ra¯yanfi a and their connections to that Vaisfinfi ava world.
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When I returned to Kolkata in 1981–82 to do dissertation research on the topic of Gaudfi ı¯ya Vaisfinfi ava hagiography, under the auspices of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program run by the U.S. The origins of this book are a little obscure, but date back to materials on Satya Pı¯r that I began to gather somewhat casually in 1978–79 while in search of representative reading materials when I was studying Bengali in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the intensive language program run by the American Institute of Indian Studies. The eight tales I have chosen to translate bear this out as well as any, for they defy classification along sectarian lines-for reasons I have outlined in the introduction-and exercise a kind of situation creativity that invites the reader or listener to grapple with morally ambiguous situations apart from the dictates of some religious injunction. It is the orientation of this practical use-not some ideological standard that measures according to pristine and exclusive categories of Hindu and Muslim-that dictates how he is depicted and understood. It was in the long period of wrestling with Asim Roy’s important characterization of syncretism in this and related literatures of precolonial Islam that I rejected his classification nearly completely and formulated an alternative model to conceptualize this figure-and I thank Asim dearly for that stimulation.1 Satya Pı¯r is a generic holy man and as such is a locus of power to whom anyone can turn when they have the need. I have located more than 750 handwritten manuscripts and more than 160 printed works by at least one hundred different authors, writing mainly in Bangla (Bengali), but even some in Sanskrit-texts that were composed in every region within Bengal. These seemingly insignificant tales turned out to be anything but-in intellectual content, in style and range, in geographic distribution, and in number-even though, when pressed, few scholars seemed to know anything about them. It began as curiosity about the figure of Satya Pı¯r, who seemed to be a syncretistic figure, an odd mixture of Hindu and Muslim, packaged in tales that were not easily classified according to any standard genres I knew. His is a book I never set out to write, but after years of working in this literature I found the need to do so. whose story, if it isn’t already here, should be Short stories, Bengali-Translations into English.
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Includes bibliographical references and index. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fabulous females and peerless pı¯rs: tales of mad adventure in old bengal / translated by Tony K. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. Fabulous Females and Peerless Pirs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengalįabulous Females and Peerless Pı¯rs Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal TRANSLATEDġ Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo TorontoĬopyright 䉷 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.