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Professor Stewart’s talk is organised jointly with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies as the Majewski Lecture for Hilary Term, 2017.
In 1287 b.s. [=1879/80 c.e.] a short Bangla work was published in Calcutta under the title of Iblichnāmār punthi by the highly productive scholar Garībullā, who had composed the text about a century earlier. This somewhat unusual text is a colloquy between the Prophet Muhammad and the fallen Iblich (Ar. Iblīs), also called Saytān. The reader is offered humorous, often naughty descriptions of the depraved and licentious acts of Saytān’s lackeys, parodies of the standard ’aḥādīth literatures regarding proper conduct—everything a good practicing Muslim is not! This fictional inversion of all that is good and proper titillates the reader in its mad escape from the Bakhtinian monologic of theology, history, and law that governs the discourse of the conservative Sunni mainstream. It is the exaggerated negative image of the law as seen from the imagined squalid underbelly of Bengali society.
Professor Stewart will give another guest lecture on a related topic, ‘When Muslim and Hindu Worlds Meet in Fiction: Mapping the Bengali Imaginaire’ on Thursday, February 16th at 2 p.m. in the Library of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.
