In Fabulous Females and Peerless Pirs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal, Tony Stewart translates eight folktales about the Middle Ages folk-religious hero Satya Pir. Satya Pir is a holy man who answers prayers for family well-being, health, and wealth. As in many folktales, genre is somewhat fuzzy, and so too is the religion of Satya Pir. It is unclear from reading the tales whether Satya Pir is Hindu or Muslim or a mixture of both. He appears as different things to different people. One supplicant will address him as Satya Narayana, implying that he is an avatar of Krishna, while another one in a different tale will be told that Satya Pir has just come from Mecca, which would make him Muslim. There are places in the tales where it is hard to decide exactly which religion he represents, for he seems to be of both. This ambiguity adds complexity and adds to the value and magic of the tales. In a world where fakirs change into saints who can change into gods, anything can and does happen.
In the Introduction, Stewart frames the Satya Pir stories as “cultural narrative.” Cultural narratives are stories of possibilities—possible actions and interactions, possible experiences, possible personalities, possible chances to explore experiences and identities that are not strictly allowed in real life. These narratives represent the imagination of a culture, showing not merely what is, but what could be.
The problem in dealing with cultural narrative, Stewart writes, arises when a scholar starts investigating historical reconstructions. These are “narratives that are largely devoid of context” (5). Much historical narrative has traditionally been preserved from court literature and religious writings. The Satya Pir stories are from a less elevated genre of a Bangla-speaking people, and it is a lucky thing that they were written down at all. This does not solve the problem of context that Stewart mentions, but rather opens the subject to a wider realm of popular imagination. Can context be reconstructed from the historical literature itself? Maybe not.
What these tales do construct is a set of gender expectations and relations. These cultural narratives speak to and of women’s roles and possibilities for the transcendence of the prescribed roles by the grace of Satya Pir and the ingenuity of the women and their children. When the actions of the fathers or husbands put the women into untenable positions, the faith and devotion of these heroines saves the day. Not only is there an affirmation of gender virtues, but also a recognition that women are the spiritual souls of the family.
With this complexity of associations among religions, gender relations, and cultural expectations, there is also a complex strain of intertextuality running throughout these narratives. The narratives themselves are more complex than most folktales and use many storyteller’s tricks: the narrator who exhorts the audience to listen, various prayers, narratorial comments upon the story’s action, and formulaic expressions that mark the beginnings and endings of the tales and ask for God’s grace for teller and audience. The paratext tells its own story.
Satya Pir’s meddling, holy, mischievous presence permeates all eight tales. In “The Wazir’s Daughter Who Married a Sacrificial Goat,” Lalmon marries a spoiled prince who cannot take proper care of her. Catastrophe follows until correct sacrifices are made to Satya Pir, who then manipulates the players and situation to his own satisfaction.
The other tales all have similar elements: it is apparent that Satya Pir is a trickster of the first order. Each tale has elements of magic mixed in with Satya Pir’s masterful management of the other characters. Princes turn into rams; princesses turn into skilled warriors; sons spit out valuable pearls. In this jeweled world of magic and fabled creatures, the one constant is Satya Pir, and these stories reiterate that proper worship and sacrifice lead to proper results, bringing about some sort of transformation so that the fortunate ones learn their lessons and return to an enriched normalcy with stronger faith than each previously possessed.
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[Review length: 669 words • Review posted on October 17, 2006]