Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance. Abanindranath Tagore: The Make-Believe Prince; Gaganendranath Tagore: Toddy-Cat the Bold by Sanjay Sircar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance. Abanindranath Tagore: The Make-Believe Prince; Gaganendranath Tagore: Toddy-Cat the Bold by Sanjay Sircar Hans Harder FANTASY FICTIONS FROM THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE. Abanindranath Tagore: The Make-Believe Prince; Gaganendranath Tagore: Toddy-Cat the Bold. Translated and annotated by Sanjay Sircar. Oxford University Press New Delhi, 2018, 339 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-948675-5 Sanjay Sircar's Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance is many things at once. Overtly, it presents English translations of two Bengali "fantasy fictions" or Kunstmärchen from the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, by two authors of the famous Tagore family of Calcutta. One is Kṣīrer putul, "The Make-Believe Prince," (1893) by Rabindranath Tagore's nephew, the painter and writer Abanindranath Tagore, and the other Bhõḍaṛ bāhādur, "Toddy-Cat the Bold," (1923) by the latter's brother, cartoonist Gaganendranath Tagore. Both these texts—"The Make-Believe Prince" more so than "Toddy-Cat the Bold"—are modern classics of Bengali literature and have seen many editions, reprints, and translations. Sanjay Sircar convincingly shows that the texts stand in need of being translated anew, and proves his point by furnishing reliable, creative, and immensely enjoyable English versions of them. Sircar has embedded the texts in what I would call extensive interpretative essays rather than mere introductions, exceeding the texts themselves greatly in length. He also provides a general introduction of their historical context, the so-called Bengal Renaissance, the period of heated activities in various spheres of culture in and around Calcutta during the high time of British colonialism in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Furthermore, Sircar's book contains an abundance of annotations, references, bibliographical lists, and other resources, making this book a mine of information about the texts in question, their genesis, publication record, the history of the various literary genres (regional and international) they draw on, and the interaction between high and popular/ folk culture at the time. Taken together, interpretative essays and annotations amount to more than two hundred pages of a book of 339. The book goes under the name of the two Tagores's texts, "translated and annotated by Sanjay Sircar," but its title is a misnomer for what is actually an extensive study of the texts and their historical context. Kṣīrer putul, "The Make-Believe Prince," tells the story of a king with two queens, the younger one greatly favored and the elder truly loving but utterly neglected. The favorite queen is spoiled and shuns the precious gifts the king brings her from a long voyage, whereas the monkey the elder queen had asked for turns out to be her well-wisher and helper. The trickster animal declares that the queen is bearing the king a prince, thus allowing her to win back the king's favor, and forbids the king to see the (nonexistent) boy for the first ten years of his life until after his wedding. When the time comes, the monkey has a "puppet of kheer" (kṣīr, [End Page 103] or thickened milk; the literal title of the book) dressed up as the prince and arranges that the puppet is eaten by hungry goddess Shashthi, bestower and protector of children. Catching her in the act of stealing, he then blackmails her to replace the puppet with by a real boy from her private kingdom of children, which solves the successor-less king's plight and ends the elder queen's sorrow. In the essay unravelling this narrative, Sircar identifies it as belonging to Aarne-Thompson's tale type AT 459, spread over India, Persia, and Palestine, and explores in great detail its motifs and narrative features. In particular, Sircar goes to great lengths in teasing out the cultural, religious, ritualistic, material, and culinary templates the text uses and manipulates. The integration of numerous chaṛās, nursery rhymes, as Sircar shows, adds to the density of folk references in what has become a crossover juvenile text, equally read by adults. The second text, Bhõdaṛ bāhādur, or "Toddy-Cat the Bold," is a dream story in some ways reminiscent of Carroll's...