Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides - Paperback

by Tony K. Stewart (Author), Ayesha A. Irani (Contribution by)

"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.

Back Jacket

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

Author Biography

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.