Tales from the Tide Country | Reading with Frontline
Dear Reader,
The book I am reading now is so fascinating that I dream about it when I put it down. And dreams figure prominently in the narrative—a poet dreams of a demigod ordering him to write a story singing his praise; a woman dreams of the moon descending from the sky and entering her womb; a merchant chances upon a wondrous dream-like city in the middle of the ocean. The book is Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Classic Bengali Tales from the Sunderbans, translated and introduced by Tony K. Stewart.
It takes us to the tide country made familiar by Amitav Ghosh’s TheHungry Tide—the Sundarbans delta spread across West Bengal and Bangladesh, where nature still reigns across endless stretches of ebbing and flowing muddy waters, mangrove forests that emerge like spirits from the waters at low tide, stealthy tigers that stalk their prey in the chiaroscuro of the forests, and massive storms that alter the landscape in minutes. The stories that spring from the swamps of the Atharobhati (literally, 18 tides) are as phantasmagoric as the land itself, consisting of gods, heroes, and their tiger armies.
Yet, as Stewart points put, they are also very real, rooted to the actualities of human and non-human lives, presenting a worldview that is contingent and practical. Composed by Muslim and Hindu poets, these tales from the early modern period have eclectic casts of Hindu deities, miracle-working Sufi saints, and heroes of both religious affiliations. “While the protagonists, both male and female, are nominally religious, Sufi saints, the texts are in no way sectarian statements or theology. They are literature, adventure stories of survival that underscore the need for people of all social and religious ranks to work together in hostile environments,” says Stewart in the introduction.
Stewart is a specialist in the early modern literature of the Bengali-speaking world. His 2019 book, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination, won the 2021 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. In the introduction to Witness to Marvels, he points at an anomaly that struck me too in reading these stories about Islamic figures like Satya Pir or Bada Khan Gaji—they are rarely discussed in scholarly circles and very few lay readers have heard of them. “[W]e have ignored them even though they have been pervasive for centuries. It is our loss if we do not listen to these voices—and from them we can learn things not possible through the dominant discourses of history, theology, and law that drive so much of our understanding of Islam today,” writes Stewart.
Indeed, I was jolted by the very first text that Stewart translates in the book—”Ray Mangal Kavya”, composed by Krishnaram Das in 1686. It is a record of the exploits of the Hindu demigod Dakshin Ray, the mythical lord of the Sundarbans regions, who rides a tiger with the very Islamic-sounding name of Hir. In the tale, his adversary initially is Bada Khan Gaji, a revered Sufi warrior, with whom he fights for territorial allegiances. In the end, they become fast friends after their dispute is settled by the supreme god of the universe, Lord Isvar, who, astonishingly, holds “the Koran in one hand and the Puran in the other.” Lord Isvar is described as a composite figure, half dark-skinned Narayana and half light-skinned mendicant Prophet or paygambar. In his peace-making speech, he tells Bada Khan Gaji that “You and [Dakshin] Ray are one and the same.” Lord Isvar’s speech left me speechless, wondering where such syncretism had gone in the intervening centuries.
“Ray Mangal” is spellbinding for other reasons too. A remarkable section gives names and voices to the tigers as they gather for battle, looking like a “raging forest fire”. Their stories are funny, but in expressing the dangers the tigers face while hunting humans—Bhutaliya’s testicles are crushed by feisty women, Durbar’s whiskers are singed in one encounter, and he is trapped in a cowshed in another—they speak of the human-animal conflict that has been going on in the delta from times immemorial.
When Lord Isvar appears to make peace between Dakshin Ray and Bada Khan Gaji, he also addresses the top tiger, Khan Dauda, warning him of the dangers that come from humans: “The vile savages of these wilds are unpredictable animals. Should you encounter them, they will break your necks, and for this reason you should avoid them.” One might think the “wild savages” referred to here are tigers, when it is actually humans that Lord Isvar is describing in such unflattering terms. In a feat of zoomorphic imagination, Krishnaram Das upends the human view of the world to speak for tigers.
The poet also displays a profound environmental consciousness, differentiating the trees and birds of the delta and predicting a future where the ceaseless exploitation of forest resources for timber, salt, and honey will spell doom for its human and non-human inhabitants. What he advocates as solution is balance—an empathetic understanding of every viewpoint to the advantage of all—that applies as much to inter-human relationship as to that between humans and animals and forests.
Eco-fiction might be a contemporary trend in world literature, but texts like “Ray Mangal” prove that Indian authors have been engaging with the fallouts of environmental exploitation for a long time. In Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, historian Ramachandra Guha offers portraits of 10 founding figures of environmentalism in India. A book of immense scholarship, it is thoughtfully reviewed by Yuvan Aves in the latest issue of Frontline. Do read it to know how poets like Rabindranath Tagore spoke of truths like the centrality of nature in human life that the rest of the world is arriving at only now.
The recent Frontline issue boasts some of the best book reviews in recent months. There is the well-argued and incisive review by Harish Trivedi of G.N. Devy’s India: A Linguistic Civilization, the deeply felt review by Varsha Tiwary of Zara Chowdhary’s memoir, The Lucky Ones. Chowdhary, who survived the 2002 Gujarat riots, refuses to let trauma limit her identity. In her review, Tiwary points out how a memoir centring on a tragedy must go beyond the easy option of begging for cheap pity if it is to be counted as a sound work of literature.
Interestingly, trauma and its tendency to overshadow all other concerns is the subject of Hanif Kureishi’s memoir, Shattered, too. Kureishi suffered a fall in 2022 that left him paralysed. Tabish Khair says in his review that Shattered “remains a testament to his [Kureishi’s] brave struggle to not just keep writing but also to remain human and alive.”
While these reviews keep your weekend busy, I will return to reading about the exploits of the female Sufi saint, Bonbibi, the matron goddess of the Sunderbans, venerated to this day by Hindus and Muslims alike.
See you next in February, when the Tabebuia rosea starts flowering furiously in my city, Bangalore, to turn it powder-puff pink, like a Barbie dream. Goodbye till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
Deputy Editor, Frontline
Dear Reader,
The book I am reading now is so fascinating that I dream about it when I put it down. And dreams figure prominently in the narrative—a poet dreams of a demigod ordering him to write a story singing his praise; a woman dreams of the moon descending from the sky and entering her womb; a merchant chances upon a wondrous dream-like city in the middle of the ocean. The book is Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Classic Bengali Tales from the Sunderbans, translated and introduced by Tony K. Stewart.
It takes us to the tide country made familiar by Amitav Ghosh’s TheHungry Tide—the Sundarbans delta spread across West Bengal and Bangladesh, where nature still reigns across endless stretches of ebbing and flowing muddy waters, mangrove forests that emerge like spirits from the waters at low tide, stealthy tigers that stalk their prey in the chiaroscuro of the forests, and massive storms that alter the landscape in minutes. The stories that spring from the swamps of the Atharobhati (literally, 18 tides) are as phantasmagoric as the land itself, consisting of gods, heroes, and their tiger armies.
Yet, as Stewart points put, they are also very real, rooted to the actualities of human and non-human lives, presenting a worldview that is contingent and practical. Composed by Muslim and Hindu poets, these tales from the early modern period have eclectic casts of Hindu deities, miracle-working Sufi saints, and heroes of both religious affiliations. “While the protagonists, both male and female, are nominally religious, Sufi saints, the texts are in no way sectarian statements or theology. They are literature, adventure stories of survival that underscore the need for people of all social and religious ranks to work together in hostile environments,” says Stewart in the introduction.
Stewart is a specialist in the early modern literature of the Bengali-speaking world. His 2019 book, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination, won the 2021 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. In the introduction to Witness to Marvels, he points at an anomaly that struck me too in reading these stories about Islamic figures like Satya Pir or Bada Khan Gaji—they are rarely discussed in scholarly circles and very few lay readers have heard of them. “[W]e have ignored them even though they have been pervasive for centuries. It is our loss if we do not listen to these voices—and from them we can learn things not possible through the dominant discourses of history, theology, and law that drive so much of our understanding of Islam today,” writes Stewart.
Indeed, I was jolted by the very first text that Stewart translates in the book—”Ray Mangal Kavya”, composed by Krishnaram Das in 1686. It is a record of the exploits of the Hindu demigod Dakshin Ray, the mythical lord of the Sundarbans regions, who rides a tiger with the very Islamic-sounding name of Hir. In the tale, his adversary initially is Bada Khan Gaji, a revered Sufi warrior, with whom he fights for territorial allegiances. In the end, they become fast friends after their dispute is settled by the supreme god of the universe, Lord Isvar, who, astonishingly, holds “the Koran in one hand and the Puran in the other.” Lord Isvar is described as a composite figure, half dark-skinned Narayana and half light-skinned mendicant Prophet or paygambar. In his peace-making speech, he tells Bada Khan Gaji that “You and [Dakshin] Ray are one and the same.” Lord Isvar’s speech left me speechless, wondering where such syncretism had gone in the intervening centuries.
“Ray Mangal” is spellbinding for other reasons too. A remarkable section gives names and voices to the tigers as they gather for battle, looking like a “raging forest fire”. Their stories are funny, but in expressing the dangers the tigers face while hunting humans—Bhutaliya’s testicles are crushed by feisty women, Durbar’s whiskers are singed in one encounter, and he is trapped in a cowshed in another—they speak of the human-animal conflict that has been going on in the delta from times immemorial.
When Lord Isvar appears to make peace between Dakshin Ray and Bada Khan Gaji, he also addresses the top tiger, Khan Dauda, warning him of the dangers that come from humans: “The vile savages of these wilds are unpredictable animals. Should you encounter them, they will break your necks, and for this reason you should avoid them.” One might think the “wild savages” referred to here are tigers, when it is actually humans that Lord Isvar is describing in such unflattering terms. In a feat of zoomorphic imagination, Krishnaram Das upends the human view of the world to speak for tigers.
The poet also displays a profound environmental consciousness, differentiating the trees and birds of the delta and predicting a future where the ceaseless exploitation of forest resources for timber, salt, and honey will spell doom for its human and non-human inhabitants. What he advocates as solution is balance—an empathetic understanding of every viewpoint to the advantage of all—that applies as much to inter-human relationship as to that between humans and animals and forests.
Eco-fiction might be a contemporary trend in world literature, but texts like “Ray Mangal” prove that Indian authors have been engaging with the fallouts of environmental exploitation for a long time. In Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, historian Ramachandra Guha offers portraits of 10 founding figures of environmentalism in India. A book of immense scholarship, it is thoughtfully reviewed by Yuvan Aves in the latest issue of Frontline. Do read it to know how poets like Rabindranath Tagore spoke of truths like the centrality of nature in human life that the rest of the world is arriving at only now.
The recent Frontline issue boasts some of the best book reviews in recent months. There is the well-argued and incisive review by Harish Trivedi of G.N. Devy’s India: A Linguistic Civilization, the deeply felt review by Varsha Tiwary of Zara Chowdhary’s memoir, The Lucky Ones. Chowdhary, who survived the 2002 Gujarat riots, refuses to let trauma limit her identity. In her review, Tiwary points out how a memoir centring on a tragedy must go beyond the easy option of begging for cheap pity if it is to be counted as a sound work of literature.
Interestingly, trauma and its tendency to overshadow all other concerns is the subject of Hanif Kureishi’s memoir, Shattered, too. Kureishi suffered a fall in 2022 that left him paralysed. Tabish Khair says in his review that Shattered “remains a testament to his [Kureishi’s] brave struggle to not just keep writing but also to remain human and alive.”
While these reviews keep your weekend busy, I will return to reading about the exploits of the female Sufi saint, Bonbibi, the matron goddess of the Sunderbans, venerated to this day by Hindus and Muslims alike.
See you next in February, when the Tabebuia rosea starts flowering furiously in my city, Bangalore, to turn it powder-puff pink, like a Barbie dream. Goodbye till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
Deputy Editor, Frontline
