Review: Needle at the Bottom of the Sea by Tony K Stewart

Hindustan Times

23-05-2025

I come from a Hindu, Ghoti Bengali family (ie one native to West Bengal) that migrated to Rajasthan three generations ago. I moved to Delhi for college and stayed on for over 20 years and now live in Bengaluru. The world of the Sundarbans is far away from the worlds I have inhabited and I have never set foot there either. Most of the stories in this collection feature pirs and fakirs while, as a child, I grew up juggling between my grandmother's Shaktaism and grandfather's Vaishnavite faith. And yet, I can relate to the five stories in this collection. Why? Because they are about faith, honesty, virtue and bravery – fairly universal qualities.
Although, that's not quite the end of it. Included here is a story, Wayward Wives and Their Magical Flying Tree, from Satya Narayaner Puthi of Kavi Vallabh. Our family continues to hold Satyanarayan paths at home and an uncle who is unabashedly right wing is a great believer in Satyanarayan. In this book we find that Satyanarayan was/is Satya Pir. In fact, 'All of the texts assert that Satya Narayan and Satya Pir were more than synonymous – they were simply two names for the same figure and were used interchangeably.'
Stewart explains this in his introduction, 'The adventures of the pirs and bibis evidently struck a chord somewhere in the Bengali psyche, establishing an equivalence of characters and cosmology that normalized the Sufi world in the Bengali cultural landscape. The pirs and phakirs, the bibis, the gajis became the equivalent of Vaisnav mendicant vairagis of nath siddhas, of ascetic sannyasis. And this is certainly a large part of the cultural work these tales performed, for they did not seek to impose a new religion imported from outside, but to locate their holy figures in the traditional Indic cosmology of Bengal. These stories are not just commemorative of how Islam came to Bengal, but of how they served to naturalize, to insinuate Bengal into Islam. Writing Bengal and Bengalis into the literature of the wider Muslim world, they give us a glimpse of the way Bengal made Islam its own.'
In these stories, as Stewart writes in his informative introduction, 'The protagonists encounter predicaments faced by every human being, but the presence of marvels beyond the ordinary signals creative solutions on a heroic scale.' Sounds like fantasy, right? It is Indian fantasy without any tropes or the hero's journey borrowed from Western writing. There are ghosts and fairies and gods and demi-gods galore. There are at least two major battle scenes between Gaji Pir and Dakshin Ray that reminded me of the battle scenes from the Iliad, though with a touch of the comic as there are lions and supernatural beings that talk of their brave feats.
Sample this from one of Gaji Pir's tigers: 'I, Sisir, have double the strength in my body. I have stalked men by the hundreds in the forest, then strike and maul them from my hiding place. Is there any other who can match my footspeed?/ When I crouch and ball up my body, tighter and smaller than a cat, I slink undetected, with my chest pressing the ground.'
The appearance of a tiger called Pecamukha made me laugh because peca also means owl in Bangla – so he is called 'owl-face' – and, of course, every Bengali child has been told to not make a face like a peca!.
What's also remarkable is that despite the fact that Pir and Ray are pitted as adversaries, in the first story, The Auspicious Tale of the Lord of the Southern Regions: The Ray Mangal of Krsnaram Das, Ray is the hero while in the second story, which is actually a love story – maybe the only love story of a Pir ('it is simply unprecedented', we are told – Gaji Kalu O Campavati Kanyar Puthi of Abdul Ohab), Gaji Pir becomes the hero. This balancing act indicates Stewart's meticulous curation.
In his introduction, he says: 'Literary historians have somewhat mistakenly characterized them as fairy tales or folktales, but those labels impose expectations on the reader that imply in the South Asian context that the tales lack literary merit. While they are certainly akin to those genres in spirit, the stories involve a kind of timelessness, taking place in an indeterminate age, long before the present, though not without occasional allusions to historical events.' He also discusses the beauty and specificity in details in the descriptions, especially of the flora and fauna of the region to highlight the literary merit of the stories.
In the introduction to the Ray Mangal story, he shows how the author Krsnaram Das has a pitch perfect beginning. Ray visits him in his dream, commissioning him to write his story properly. If he doesn't, he says he will kill Das and his family. Why? Because 'previous author had made it into a farce'.
The author also employs the meta-narrative trope when Puspadatta, a voyaging merchant asks one of his helmsmen about Ray and Gaji's fight for dominion. We find another story-within-a-story in the Satya Narayan Puthi tale.
A funny bit has Gaji saying about Ray, 'I have to see for myself quickly what kind of devil, Saytan, he is. Every day his bare fists pummel people into bloody submission. He seizes their land and with a flourish produces a document that testifies to his ownership, that claims it as his property.' A critique of the zamindari system?
The translation, which perhaps in trying to be as close to the original as possible, slips in places as it does on page 62 with 'personally do physical battle with the phakir.' Also, machjed for masjid, 'darbar court', 'Stainless Lord, Niranjan' might seem odd to an Indian reader.
In places, the stories echo the Manusmriti with women being seen as a distraction from the spiritual path and also being exhorted to take control of the domestic realm to 'be the women you are meant to be' (p. 235). They are either benevolent, protective matrons like Bonbibi or airheaded murderous villains as in Wayward Wives and Their Magical Flying Tree. Nothing revolutionary there.
Still, the book has something for everyone. There are precise diacritics, extensive bibliography and glossary, notes, exhaustive introductions detailing the research methodology and versions and their differences for the academics. But if you are not into that, the storytelling with the perfect arcs and characterizations holds the average reader's attention too.
Priyanka Sarkar is an editor, translator and writer.