The stories of miracle-working Sufi saints (pirs) have circulated in the Bangla-speaking world for most of the past millennium. They are romances filled with wondrous marvels, where tigers talk, rocks float and waters part, and faeries carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of fate, Bidhata, has ordained his marriage.
Converging Hindu-Muslim Traditions
Somdatta Mandal
NEEDLE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA: BENGALI TALES FROM THE LAND OF THE EIGHTEEN TIDES by Translated from the original Bengali by Tony K. Stewart University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2023, 424 pp., $ 24.95
April 2024, volume 48, No 4