Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance ed. by Sanjay Sircar (review)

This is a major book mainly for scholars of folktales and fairy tales, and let us hope that Oxford University Press in India finds a way through its parent company in the United Kingdom to make it more available in English-speaking countries than it is now.

The book consists of Sanjay Sircar’s excellent translations from the Bengali of Abanindranath Tagore’s Khirer Putul (The Make-Believe Prince, 1896) and Gaganendranath Tagore’s Bhodor Bahadur (Otter the Great, 1946) along with Sircar’s long and thorough introductions to these tales. In his foreword to this edition, Peter Hunt remarks that “Sircar has not only worked with powerful texts, and provided much useful context for them; but his efforts have been directed towards scrupulously accurate translation into English which conveys a non-Western cultural and linguistic flavor, but which is clearly understandable” (x).

Actually, the Tagore brothers are better known in India and the world as groundbreaking modern painters and founders of the Indian Society of Oriental Art. Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938) was also a cartoonist, and his major contribution to literature was Bhodor Bahadur (Otter the Great), published posthumously in Bengali and later in English by different translators. This remarkable “fable” was based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and Sircar, who uses a different title, Toddy-Cat the Bold, points out its unique significance: “Unlike Carroll’s Gaganendranath’s wonderland reflects the real-world co-existence of separate ethnicities and regional/linguistic and religious communities in India, which has in general long taken for granted something like the phenomenon that the West now terms ‘multiculturalism,’ but in which groups co-exist, form alliances, but nevertheless stay separate” (191). In this regard, Tagore’s accomplishment is the transformation of a Victorian fantasy into a mock beast epic that mirrors social conflicts in India and reveals how the major protagonist, cat/otter, regains his childhood in old age.

Long before Gaganendranath wrote his narrative, his brother Abanindranath (1871–1951) published Khirer Putul (The Make-Believe Prince), a children’s fairy tale, in 1896, which also depicts aspects of Indian customs and conflicts of the Bengal Renaissance. In this case, as Sircar admirably demonstrates, the younger Tagore transformed a well-known folktale type, ATU 459 “The Make-Believe Son (Daughter),” into a stunning literary fairy tale in which an extraordinary monkey enables a neglected queen to regain her status after her husband had abandoned her. The plot is simple and comical, somewhat like Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837). Once his first wife Duo Rani grows less attractive, the king of Deepnagar discards her and spends all his time with his second wife, Suo Rani, to whom he gives seven kingdoms, seven gardens, seven chariots, and so on. Duo Rani is forced to live in squalor. Nevertheless something is still missing in the king’s life—an heir. Suo Rani cannot provide him with a male heir. Consequently, Duo Rani has the good fortune to draw the compassion of an extraordinary monkey, who tricks and convinces the king that the elderly Duo Rani is pregnant and will provide him an heir. However, the king is not allowed to see his first wife until after she has given birth. The monkey connives and deceives a goddess who enables a sugar or milky doll to be transformed into a child, and the king is reconciled with the first wife.

The Make-Believe Prince was illustrated by Abanindranath and contained poems, as does Toddy-Cat the Bold. Sircar provides an elaborate and thorough sociohistorical background to both stories so that readers unfamiliar with Indian folklore and children’s literature will be able to grasp how important this period of the Bengal Renaissance was for the flowering of both indigenous Indian children’s literature and the literary translations from Bengali to English. Questions of colonization, adaptation, translation, and tradition are raised throughout Sircar’s erudite introductions to...