Kaiser Haq, The Triumph of the Snake Goddess. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2015

Kaiser Haq's The Triumph of the Snake Goddess is a delightful read. Clearly, his story of the snake goddess Manasa is a work of immense scholarship and the result of much intense study of not easily accessible medieval Bengali texts. Clearly, too, Haq had to spend hours and hours stitching together his tale of Manasa's ascension to the regional pantheon from the many extant versions of her activities. But what is truly amazing is how lightly Haq wears his scholarship and how entertaining and accessible is the story he narrates; his telling of the snake goddess's adventures is sparkling, racy, bawdy and flavored with witty moments that make the work a wonderful comic epic in prose for our times.

Take, for instance, the story of Shiva's dalliances in Part One, which is titled, "In the Divine Realm." You might think that this mighty God, fabled as "the destroyer," and as a member of the Holy Trinity of Hindu Gods (along with Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver), would be presented to mere mortals only as ascetic and awe-inspiring. But in Haq's retelling of events in the life of this divine ancestor of the snake goddess, Shiva comes off as seductive, raunchy and given to casual philandering; his bordello visits thus drive his wife Chandi to distraction. After all, "he was Lingaraj, lord of the phallus, the epitome of male potency" and Chandi has to resort to all kind of subterfuges to keep him within bounds every now and then.

Time and again, Haq adds innumerable deft idiosyncratic touches to his story of gods and goddesses so that we don't see them as denizens of ethereal realms; his narrative aims to let readers know that these are supernatural beings of a folk tradition that humanizes immortals in any which way it can. Evidently, Haq would like to continue in that tradition in every possible way. His narrative strategy, in other words, is to bring the deities down to the level of the readers; he wants us to be always aware that what he is following, after all, is an oral tradition where anthropomorphic characterizing is the rule and not the exception. Thus Padma, aka Manasa, Shiva's daughter from his second wife, Ganga, summons the master builder Vishwakarma, famed as the "master builder of the divine realm" and offers him—guess what!—a paan before discussing his commission that will lead to a city of fabulous proportions. When she has that house built, Padma celebrates in the appropriate way---by having—guess again!—a "lively housewarming party with her siblings and friends."

As anyone channel hopping with a remote in our times knows, this is the era of Hindi "mythologicals"; they appear, at times, to be simply unavoidable on our television sets no matter how much you abominate them. Small wonder, then, that Haq's often post-modern retelling of the popular gods and goddesses of this part of South Asia, resorts so ingeniously and uncannily to TV serials (or Hindi films) in depicting the subterfuges of his immortals. For example, when the great God Vishnu takes on the guise of 'the enchantress" Mohini to disable demons, she dresses up like the femme fatale of the sub-continental silver screen. Eyebrows "excitingly animated," "pink lips" pouting, she has a figure that makes her a repository of "sex appeal."' Indeed, so provocative and distracting is she in her sari that she can 'even distract the most assiduously meditating ascetic"! In the second part of The Snake Goddess, which brings the narrative down to the realm of the merchant king, Chand, from the ethereal one, Padma decides to tame the hostile earthly sovereign any which way she can. One of her attempts to disable him is straight out of a Hindi film, for she becomes 'an attractive flower girl, comely and curvaceous, revealing dazzling and swaying body parts, partly due to "the clinging style of her sari!" Lest we miss the point, Haq's narrator underscores it a couple of pages later with the arch observation that Padma has here "all the physical endowments and accouterments loved by writers of erotic literature." And for good measure, Haq, a poet of eminence, gives us music too to accompany the visual image, deftly describing the seductress moving to the accompaniment of "toe rings attached by the chain to anklets with tiny tinkling bells." But as Haq observes in his excellent "Prologue" it is Behula, wife of Manasa's most persistent antagonist Chand, who is "the central star" of the "folk block buster;" Behula's climactic dance performance before Shiva, Haq adds drolly in his introductory pages, "has all the primal allure of a Bollywood number."

Nevertheless, Haq's narrative of the eventual triumph of the snake goddess over her foes and detractors is not unserious; his tale has its moral aspects as any good telling of divine myths—folk or not--must have. It is replete too with historically significant and anthropologically astute moments. As with all stories that deal with the gods and heroes but have their roots in originary moments in a nation's history and cultural practices that have left their mark on generations, we are given lessons and illustrations of way to deal with the unforeseen in any number of ways. Repeatedly, the narrative is interspersed with sententious comments about the inevitability of fate, so appropriate in a deltaic world where life was lived precariously even at the best of times. A kind of stoicism and regular prayers to the unforeseen forces that seem to control destinies are the lessons/ practices prescribed repeatedly in the tale.  Yama, god of death, is therefore admonished by Padma, albeit in Haq's whimsical telling, in the following manner: "You have your portfolio, but don't try to overstep its limits." In other words, in a world where everything is written, one must stick to one's place, whether in the divine world or the lower one. The moral pronounced to Chand's wife Sonaka by Padma, disguised as her "auntie", is typically a simple but profound one: "Where there is life, there is death, and yet life must go on"

As for history, which is the bedrock of all mythical tales, no matter how otherworldly or improbable they may appear to be, Haq notes how at one point in their retelling, the Manasa tales incorporated important episodes in the history of Bengal, such as the coming of the Muslims to the region. Indeed, Haq comments in his  very incisive as well as helpful "Prologue" that not only "much can be gleaned about life in Bengal between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries from the Manasa extant tales that he used as his sources" but also that "much of what we learn from them is still true of traditional life in the countryside." Shrewdly, he instances the incident of the six sons of Chand trying panta bhaat after being told of this concoction by a poor classmate of this watered rice dish served in an age without refrigeration in poor households. This, he suggests archly, is both an instance of the "rich-poor divide, as well as the tendency among the fortune to enjoy slumming", as seen even now in the Bengali New Year's Day celebrations in present-day Bangladesh.

Haq points out how the Hassan and Hossein episode of the narrative he has reconstructed is indicative of the part played by some Muslim settlers in "extending agriculture in Bengal". To him the signs of prosperity that one can adduce from the Hassan-Hossein episodes reveal the opulence of Bengal in the days of the Bengal Sultans. Of sociological interest in the narrative is the synthesis of different religious traditions he has been able to achieve from the extant versions. Wisdom for everyday life also abounds as when a courtier tries to impress Chand with a truth that he knows cannot be underestimated: "Trade and commerce are the economic backbone of a nation, the source of artha, wealth." Indeed, Huq states in his Prologue that the enduring as well as the syncretic nature of the Manasa tales makes it possible for him to side with someone like Professor Muhammad Shahjahan Mian, a scholar who has done extensive works on the central Manasa narrative, when he sees it as the "national epic" of Bangladesh. 

Certainly, The Triumph of the Snake Goddess has its epic moments. While in the first part we have episodes set in the high heavens and depiction of cataclysmic churnings on earth, in the second part we have the epic sea voyage of the merchant king down the Gangetic delta and into the Bay of Bengal, and Behula's unforgettable river journey for her spouse's sake. For good measure, we have moments with some mastans or hoodlums of the underworld, for we must know that its "big boss" Yama and "his minions" forever intend to "threaten the stability of the universe as a whole." I particularly delighted in the description of Behula's bodice, for not merely is this a wonderful instance of Huq's luxuriant imagination but also a reminder—intertextually—that Manasa's tale belongs to the tradition of epic poetry so classically established with Homer's Iliad and so superbly evoked in W.H. Auden's poetic re-visioning of the shield of Achilles.

Kaiser Huq's achievement in The Triumph of the Snake Goddess is thus manifold. Deftly and ingeniously, he has written a sort of national epic for Bangladeshis that is also an updating of a traditional folk epic (if we can be generous in assessing such claims and not bigoted or pedantic) as well as a tale of gods and goddesses and mortals mired in the web woven by destiny—in other words, a work in the tradition of the major epics of the world. He has given us a work that we can delight in with scholarship that can entertain as well as edify. I can only hope that this elegantly produced Harvard University Press book will be available for readers in the subcontinent at a price or in an edition that is accessible and affordable; the effort and creativity Haq has put into his tale deserve nothing less.

Fakrul Alam is Professor of English at the University of Dhaka.