Medieval Bengal saw the rise of a narrative genre known as ma ṅgalkāvya (auspicious poetry), a sort of folk epic form that may have existed in oral form before it became a literary genre. The corpus is dedicated to celebrating the deeds of the various deities included in the vernacular pantheon of eastern India, especially greater Bengal. Each auspicious poem was dedicated to and named after a specific deity, with the aim of convincing the hearer or reader that the deity in whose honor the text was written is the greatest of all and should therefore be worshipped. The genre thus had a panegyric function in a competitive religious environment where Hindu sectarian communities competed mostly with Islam but also with Christianity. In true epic form, the main deity of the text battles with other deities to win over human devotees. Vaishnavite deities were thus pitted against Shaivite ones, and even Muslim legendary heroes such as brother martyrs Hassan and Husain make their way into the storytelling tradition to accommodate Muslim concerns. One of the distinct characters in this Bengali pantheon was Manasa, the snake goddess worshipped throughout eastern India even down to the present day. Her story is well known through the region, and it exists in multiple forms, both oral and written.

Kaiser Haq, a professor of English at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh and a poet himself, takes up the task of retelling the story for the modern reader, but before he does so he presents us with an informative twenty-seven-page prologue in which he contextualizes the Manasa narrative historically, linguistically, and socially. He emphasizes how the narrative was always a part of a performative tradition that existed in both villages and courts. The distinction between dichotomies such as “classical” and “folk” do not apply to the ma ṅgalkāvya, for the narratives existed in a variety of forms that reached different social classes ranging from rural to urban. Not surprisingly, the various retellings of the core narrative led to a textual tradition that was also variegated, resulting in a number of recensions, each with its distinctive features. Haq correctly suggests that each is an authentic work of literary art in and of itself, with no ur-text upon which the various versions are based. For this reason, Haq chose to focus on a composite version based on all of the extant texts, which range from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Haq tells us that he surveyed all of the versions and created a composite narrative based on five versions of the text, thereby providing a fuller rendering of the story cycle. It is, as Wendy Doniger points out in her introduction, “the very opposite of a critical edition; one might call it an uncritical edition” (p. 27). As such Haq puts back in episodes that were excised from one or the other of the various written versions. By being “uncritical,” Haq becomes a part of the storytelling tradition that inspires this work. The result is not a translation, per se, but rather a retelling or transcreation. I approached his text with some skepticism but concluded in the end that the finished product was a useful addition to the literature. It is not a scholarly contribution to the literature on Bengali literature or folklore but rather a creative addition to the storytelling tradition out of which his book grew.

Haq's retelling is a good read and would be appropriate for an undergraduate class on Bengali literature. It could also supplement the study of the various versions of the Manasāmaṅgal corpus, since Haq includes an appendix in which he indicates the sources he consulted for each of the chapters of his retelling. There is also a glossary, which unfortunately does not include diacritics to aid the student in proper spelling and pronunciation. Lastly, it would have been helpful to include an index to make it easier to search the text. These minor quibbles aside, Haq has provided us with an exciting and highly readable version of the auspicious story of the snake goddess. Hopefully, he will translate it back into Bengali, so that indigenous readers will also be able to benefit from his ability to convert verse form into a punchy prose narrative.