Abstract
Bangla maṅgala-kāvyas are narrative poems (kāvya) which tell the story of a god or a goddess descending to Earth to gain followers and establish a cult; these poems seek the blessing (maṅgala) of the divinity whose story they tell. Though maṅgala-kāvyas were composed primarily from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the performance tradition continues to the present. There has always been an open flow between text and performance, with oral culture altering the written word and literary culture drawing on performers’ innovations: authorship is never simple.
It is precisely this textuality which Kaiser Haq recreates, stitching together pieces from a wide selection of maṅgala-kāvyas to create a novel retelling of the story of Manasā, the snake-goddess. Rather than producing a translation of a single Manasā-maṅgala, Haq produces a summary and an introduction to the entire Manasā-maṅgala corpus—each chapter loosely translates and/or adapts the work of one or more authors.
Haq’s work joins a handsome shelf of works on maṅgala-kāvyas and fills in a crucial gap by providing access to primary sources in translation. The book’s two introductions frame the story by giving just enough context to guide the reader without overdetermining the text’s interpretation and foreclosing future engagement. This is something of a rare feat when dealing with premodern literature from a culturally unfamiliar world. Doniger and Haq deserve considerable praise for letting the text do its work as literature and not encasing the narrative in a hermeneutic museum.
There are now three major translations of maṅgala-kāvyas: Bhattacharya’s French translation of Vipradāsa’s Manasāvijaya, Yazijian’s English translation of Mukundarāma’s Caṇḍīmaṅgala and Haq’s adaptation. Curley’s interpretive work on the Caṇḍīmaṅgala remains the key monograph in English, but the introductions in this volume usefully supplement his essays. As these scholars have pointed out, maṅgala-kāvyas are relevant for historians because they self-consciously narrate the then contemporary world (as opposed to some mythic era) with an eye to social realities and historical processes.
Doniger’s introduction performs two tasks. First, she dwells on Manasā’s character, calling attention to the Goddess’ femininity, sexuality and moral ambivalence. Next, she retells a set of stories concerning snakes from the Mahābhārata’s first book, giving us a glimpse into the thick intertextuality between those texts and the Manasā-maṅgala corpus. Doniger touches on the relationship between myth and history, for stories like these reckon with the historical processes by which Vedic Brahmins assimilated non-Brahmanical practices (like snake worship) and peoples. Evidence from this early period is thin, but this is precisely the sort of process that is apparent in later texts like the maṅgala-kāvyas; Haq’s introduction delves deeper into these concerns. Much of what Haq says will be familiar to students of Bengal, but Haq’s condensed review will help others.
Haq provides the standard model of Bengali literary history: the destruction of the Sena kingdom—and thus its Sanskrit literary culture—by Bakhtiyar Khalji in 1204 CE, followed by a dark age until 1342 CE, when Ilyas Shah came to power and restored stability, ushering in a new era in which Bengali literature began to come of age. This new culture mixed Hindu and Muslim elements and flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries under Hussain and Nusrat Shah. These centuries saw the compositions of maṅgala-kāvyas, Sufi works, Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava literature and the vernacular versions of the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa.
From here, Haq—following Sukumar Sen—goes into the general outlines of the Manasā corpus, giving us the name, date and location of each of the major authors and singling out East Bengal as the region in which Manasā enjoys the most popularity. The corpus begins with Vijaya Gupta (1494 CE) and Vipradāsa (1495 CE) under Hussain Shah and continues—though not without interruption—to the present, with Jamil Ahmed’s 2011 theatrical adaptation, televised serials and Haq’s own work. This leads him to detail his method, explaining why certain authors were selected for certain passages and not others.
For the remainder of his introduction, Haq reviews the sort of arguments put forth by Eaton and Curley: the expansion of Islam in Bengal through the advance of agricultural civilisation, the processes of assimilation and negotiation by which indigenous cults—like Manasās—dealt with both the Brahmanical and the Islamic orthodoxies and the particularity of the maṅgala-kāvya as a literary form in which these transformations and their problems could be explored and expressed by poets and performers.
Towards the end, Haq demonstrates that the Manasā-maṅgala remains relevant in this manner even today. He dwells on the figure of Manasā as a woman—and an indigenous woman at that—who challenges the patriarchal and casteist structure of Brahmanical religion and how that challenge is met and eventually accommodated in the narrative. The scenes of gendered violence against Behulā which fill the end of the Manasā story also receive due attention. Haq draws on contemporary performances to show how audiences and performers alike relate the story to gender issues today.
There are, of course, some issues with Haq’s presentation. The most significant is his use of the category of ‘folk literature’ to discuss the maṅgala-kāvyas. Haq draws a contrast between ‘Purāṇic literature’ and ‘folk literature’ to demonstrate how elements from the Purāṇas were subjected to comic, parodic and farcical treatment in the maṅgala-kāvyas. His category of ‘folk literature’ also helps in explaining why subaltern and indigenous figures—like Manasā—appear the way they do in these texts. It seems, however, that Haq’s interpretive category is inseparable from the Romanticist impulses which defined it and comes with too much baggage in the way of claims of authenticity and ethnicity to be useful.
Haq’s analysis creates a false sense of a close bond between innate, indigenous cultures and the texts as we have them: the maṅgala-kāvyas become upwellings of that culture, and we are led to underestimate the degree to which subaltern figures have been worked upon by top-down processes of subjection. ‘Cultural accommodation’ becomes a euphemism by which we name an unequal exchange between dominating social groups and the subaltern (especially in this case, subaltern women). Perhaps it is best to see these texts not as parochial ‘folk literature’ with respect to a translocal elite tradition but as the products of a higher, local and elite, literate tradition. These texts could then be seen as the records of not a naïve ‘accommodation’ but an incomplete domination.
Haq’s translation reads smoothly, like an English novel. The project of creating a composite translation is a commendable and creative way of dealing with the tradition’s textuality. Indeed, Haq’s work is less a translation than a creation of a new maṅgala-kāvya in English. For Bangla specialists, Haq provides a detailed list of his sources and where they were used. The reader can go back and track which Bangla passages match Haq’s text, but the correspondence is not one to one as it would be in a more conventional scholarly translation—but this is not a fault, since it isn’t the point anyway.
The main fault of the translation is, perhaps inevitably, a side effect of one of its virtues: the text is simply too smooth. In maṅgala-kāvya texts and performances, songs interrupt the otherwise-smooth flow of narrative and narrative time. These songs dwell on particular images or moments and often explore the author and/or the audience’s relationship with them. In Haq’s translation, there are no songs for he says that these would have been repetitive in English. Yet, this drastically alters the tradition’s textuality, a marked contrast with how well the ‘composite translation’ method fits that same textuality. A reasonable balance—one or two songs per chapter—would have been better.
The other unfortunate side effect of Haq’s seamless translation is that the voice that comes across is exclusively and singularly Haq’s—though each chapter draws on different authors, the reader will never hear these distinct voices. The text may be composite, but it is not polyvocal. But of course, these are consequences of the choices any translator must make.
A last problem is editorial: the book could really do with some maps, a list of characters and some diacritics to inform the non-specialist reader that ‘Chand’ and ‘Chandi’ are not related (wordplay with names abounds throughout the story, and the reader ought to know that this is not an instance of such). But these are small qualms.
The contemporary reader and the specialist alike will find much to enjoy between these pages, and Haq’s work is especially well suited for courses in literature. The story is vibrant, engaging and timely, with its meditations on religion and violence, gender and indigeneity and culture in times of transition. Haq makes old texts new again, and that is no small accomplishment.