Sanjay Sircar, trans., Abanindranath Tagore, and Gaganendranath Tagore, Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance : Abanindranath Tagore’s The Make-Believe Prince (Kheerer Putul) ; Gaganendranath Tagore’s Toddy-Cat the Bold (Bhondaṛ Bahadur)

This remarkable volume is at once a contribution to colonial historiography and folklore studies; a set of richly annotated translations of two nineteenth-century Bengalilanguage "fantasy fictions"; a versatile meditation on-cum demonstration of-the art of translation; a Hobson-Jobson-style encyclopedia of (mainly Bengali) flora and fauna, culinary arts, and folkways; and a work of historical anthropology.While the language of the two translated tales is at times precious-and thereby faithful to the "Victorian" style of their Bengali authors-that of Sircar himself, in his lengthy introductions and appendices, is extraordinarily rich and beautiful: even the meticulously detailed footnotes are beautifully written.Throughout, there is a lightness of touch that allows the author to playfully yet trenchantly critique ideologues from several intellectual traditions, as for example when he asks the self-referential question "Can the Bengali Christian speak?" (73, note 8).Scions of the illustrious Tagore family (338), the authors of "The Make-Believe Prince (Kheerer Putul)" and "Toddy-Cat the Bold (Bhonda Bahadur)" were deeply engaged in the late nineteenth-century sociocultural transformation often referred to as the "Bengal Renaissance."Limited to a small segment of the Bengali population, the bhadralok or "gentle folk" of socially privileged Kolkata society, this was an affirmation of Hindu ideals combined with a growing awareness of a "South Asian Selfhood" (xv).The two "classic works of fantasy fiction in West Bengal" (xxiii) translated and commented upon by Sircar express those ideals and that awareness in very different ways.While the first is a "playful variation, Spielform, of a Bengali woman's ritual tale" (brata kath xviii), the second is a Bengali-language "symbolic translation" (233) of Lewis Carroll's very British Alice in Wonderland.As Sircar argues in his "Recasting Folklore" introduction to the first tale, folklore collection by Bengali bhadralok was a response to British folklore collection, a "part of a larger imperialist project to know and thus more effectively to control those Indians who were less developed and, in effect, primitive, ancient, superstitious, pre-modern people" ( 7).Yet, at the same time, one may discern parallels in bhadralok attitudes toward their sources: "The colonized could have taken colonized methods both to know and to celebrate themselves . . .though then the matter of an urban elite celebrating itself through the culture of a rural non-elite needs to be considered" (12).