Fabulous Females and Peerless Pirs: tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal.

• Author: McDermott, Rachel Fell

Fabulous Females and Peerless Pirs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal. By TONY K. STEWART. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. Pp. xiv + 267. $24.95.

Tony Stewart is the expert on Satya Pir. He has worked on this figure, his corpus, and his community for over twenty-five years, and in the process has discovered about 750 handwritten manuscripts (a few of which were previously unnoted) and 160 printed works by over one hundred different authors writing throughout Bengal. The eight tales translated here find their closest literary parallel in the Urdu qissa; they are fixed narratives, printed in popular editions but orally performed, featuring fairies, animals that fly and talk, and corrupt ascetics. This is the first text to explore the Bengali form of the genre, and the eight stories are marvelously translated and enjoyable to read, introducing us to kings, merchants, princes, princesses, flower-sellers, ogresses, and talking birds, with a good dose of magic and illusion brought in through the machinations of Satya Pir.

This genre had its heyday in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries in Bengal, when Satya Pir was rivaled in popularity only by Krsna Caitanya. Stewart finds two distinct trajectories in the tales overall: one is sectarian, where the tales are doctrinally driven, with a focus on Satya Pir either as a Vaisnava figure or as a Muslim; and the other is "fabulous" and non-sectarian, with the dramatic action initiated more often by assertive heroines than by Satya Pir. Of the eight stories in fabulous Females and Peerless Pirs, none are of the sectarian type, six are of the fabulous type, and two straddle the borderline divide.

Stewart has three interpretive interests in this material: he wants to draw attention to the tales as literature, comparing them with other similar genres, such as legends, folk tales, fairy tales, and emergent fiction; he interprets the tales as undercutting gender stereotyping, since it is women who move the plots, rescue hapless men, challenge traditional roles by cross-dressing and parody, and act in pragmatic, if often unusual, ways to maintain order; and he is intrigued by the stories' conclusions, where he says women critique, comment on, and stretch traditional values, often associated with the male, the Brahmanical, and with royal privilege. About Satya Pir himself, we learn that he is guided by the light and power of Muhammad, that he is Krsna, and that he is both of the above...