"What would you do if that white fly buzzing around your head landed on the wall and started giving you marriage advice? Or what could possibly be your response if the mendicant Sufi you often see at prayers should in the blink of an eye shapeshift into a giant ogre, enormous fangs bulging from a bloody maw? These events, and many more like them are not uncommon in the stories (kath???as) of miracle-working Sufi saints (p???irs) that have circulated in the Bangla-speaking world for most of the last millennium. The stories ...
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"What would you do if that white fly buzzing around your head landed on the wall and started giving you marriage advice? Or what could possibly be your response if the mendicant Sufi you often see at prayers should in the blink of an eye shapeshift into a giant ogre, enormous fangs bulging from a bloody maw? These events, and many more like them are not uncommon in the stories (kath???as) of miracle-working Sufi saints (p???irs) that have circulated in the Bangla-speaking world for most of the last millennium. The stories are romances filled with wondrous marvels where tigers talk, rocks float and waters part, and f???ries carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of fate, Bidh???at???a, has ordained marriage. Each of the five stories in this anthology feature unlikely heroes and heroines, intrepid ocean-going traders, fickle gods and goddesses, prophets and holy men, and the royal whimsy of kings and zamindars. The protagonists encounter predicaments faced by every human being, but the presence of marvels beyond the ordinary signal creative solutions that are magnified to heroic scale. They revel in the skillful navigation of the quirks of everyday life, adroitly maneuvering through the obligations of pressing kinship, juggling the tensions of conflicting allegiances, cleverly satisfying competing social and religious demands which are inevitably political. While the protagonists are nominally religious, Sufi saints, both men and women, the texts are in no way sectarian statements or theology. They are literature, adventure stories of survival that underscore the necessity of people from all social and religious ranks to work together in hostile environments. They explore ways to overcome the physical challenges of living in the Sundarban mangrove swamps of southern Bengal which are rife with natural resources but teeming with myriad tigers, crocodiles, and dread diseases; and to ameliorate the occasional hostilities born of social differences of caste and economic class"--
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