Draft:Tony K. Stewart

Tony K. Stewart is a specialist in the literatures and religions of the Bengali-speaking world, with a focus on the ways early modern narratives shape Bengali culture. Currently, Stewart is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities, Emeritus, and Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus, Vanderbilt University, where he served as chair of Religious Studies (2011-2020), before retiring from teaching in 2021.

Life & Education
Born in rural Kentucky in 1954, Stewart grew up in the village of Millersburg and the town of Paris. He graduated from Bourbon County High School in 1972.

Initially entering university to study accounting, Stewart shifted to take a B.A. degree (1976) in Religious Studies (Asian emphasis) and German Language and Literature at Western Kentucky University. He earned his A.M. (1981) and Ph.D. (1985) in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at The University of Chicago. Stewart matriculated at Chicago in 1976 to study under the direction of Edward C. Dimock, Jr., the effective founder of Bengal studies in the United States. The combined focus on language training and cultural studies offered by The University of Chicago in the 1970s led Stewart to develop a deep commitment to literary translation as a natural companion to historical hermeneutics of texts and traditions, a commitment that has marked his career.

Languages
Bangla/Bengali, Dobhashi/Musalmani Bangla, Brajabuli, Sanskrit, French, and German.

Scholarship & Intellectual Influences
Stewart's research program can be broken into two closely inter-related trajectories: traditional biography and hagiography, and the fictional tales of religious heroes and heroines.

Biography, Hagiography & Bengali Religious History
Stewarts dissertation, The Biographical Images of Krsna Caitanya (1985), focused on the literatures dedicated to the Bengali god-man Krsna Caitanya (1486-1533) and how the community of believers articulated their understandings of this man deemed to be God on earth. That study led him to work with Edward C. Dimock, Jr., to translate the monumental Bengali and Sanskrit hagiography of Caitanya, which dates from the late sixteenth century. That work, a collaboration of nearly two decades, eventually appeared as Volume 56 in the Harvard Oriental Series as The Caitanya Caritāmrta of Krsnadāsa Kavirāja (1999). Stewart's interpretive study of the role of text - deliberately delayed until the translation could be published so that readers would have access to the primary materials - analyzed the text's role in shaping the decentered community of Vaisnavas, who were located in Bengal, Odisha, and the Braj regions of north India. That study, which examined the entirety of the sixteenth century Bengali and Sanskrit hagiographical tradition dedicated to Caitanya, was titled The Final World, The Caitanya Caritāmrta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (2010). John Stratton Hawley, Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, celebrates The Final Word as "a majestic and comprehensive book by any standard, ... the scholarly work of a lifetime."

Each of Stewart's forays into biography and hagiography in early modern Bengal asks a central question: What religious work do life stories of historical figures undertake? Stewart seeks to understand not just the content of the stories, but why these stories were written the way they were, deploying a hermeneutic that combined literary critical analyses, rhetorical strategies of the authors, and historical reconstruction of the early community, with a special eye toward the politics of the texts for the people who circulate them. These questions conditioned the direction of Stewart's second major body of work on the fabulous tales of Sufi saints and their Hindu analogues in the early modern period.

It was also during this period that Stewart collaborated with the poet Chase Twichell to translate Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's Vaisnava poetry as The Lover of God (2003), showcasing one of the most prolific literary lives in modern poetry in a bilingual format. The Religious Studies Review lauds the "attractive volume" as a "wonderful recreation... product of the marriage of Stewart's mastery of the linguistic and cultural forms and Twichell's ability to produce 'faithful, but not literal' English translations."

Fictional Biography/Hagiography
Two articles -- "Alternate Structures of Authority" (2000) and "In Search of Equivalence" (2001) -- marked a shift in Stewart's focus as he grappled with the figure of Satya Pīr and other fictional figures of early modern Bengali religion who seemed somehow to combine Islamic and Hindu traditions. The second of those essays eschewed the label of syncretism in favor of "search for equivalence," using translation as a theoretical perspective. Relevant to those analytical moves, Stewart's own unabridged anthology of translations of the tales of the fabled figure, Satya Pīr, can be found in the volume titled Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (2004). These marvelous stories demonstrate how Satya Pīr aids women who have been compromised by the foolish decisions made by the men around them and how, using their own devices, they manage to set the world back in order. Rachel F. McDermott, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, describes Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs as "a tantalizing gem" that establishes Stewart as "the expert on Satya Pīr."

Stewart's recent monograph, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (2019), extends the inquiry into storytelling, a study of the fabulous accounts of Sufi saints, both male and female, ranging from who sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. That study won the 2021 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize for best senior monograph in South Asia from the Association for Asian Studies: "Tony K. Stewart opens up an entire genre of popular Bengali literature to serious scholarly scrutiny. Although pīr-kathas, or tales about the fabulous deeds of Sufi saints, have flourished since at least the sixteenth century in both oral and written forms, they were largely ignored by scholars due to their magical character and lowbrow origins. Stewart demonstrates, through deep familiarity with this Bengali genre and the creative application of literary critical methods, that these Sufi-inspired stories of adventure and marvel were far more than mere entertainment. Pīr-kathas also performed the valuable cultural role of introducing Islamic elements into a familiar regional landscape of story-telling about the supernatural. Weaving Islamic and Indic cosmologies together in a multitude of ways, over time these stories increasingly envisioned a shared world in which Islamic perspectives were ascendant. The fresh light cast on the processes of religious conversion in Witness to Marvels make it significant far beyond the realm of Bengali literature, religion, and history. It also offers both inspiration and new methods for the study of numerous genres of tale and literature that scholars from precolonial South Asia have neglected for too long."What cultural work do fictional stories of religious heroes and heroines, of gods and goddesses undertake? Because these stories are fictions, they cannot articulate explicit theology, yet they are celebrated as religious texts. The work of the text is discernible in part by the way it operates within what Stewart has defined as the Imaginaire (see Chapter Four of Witness to Marvels to review Stewart's work on the subject). The Imaginaire can be understood as the arena in which a text or any other cultural production comes into existence, the conditions that make it possible. Inspired by Jonathan Culler's article "Presupposition and Intertextuality" (1976), a text will have precursors, both explicit and implicit, and will ipso facto assume pragmatic presuppositions, such as language and genre, as well as logical presuppositions, such as what constitutes a valid argument. But within that creative arena, new ideas can be articulated, and so it was with the texts found in Witness to Marvels as Muslim authors articulated a new vision for Bengali culture, one in which Islam was normalized as patently Bengali, while at the same time these authors wrote Bengal into a larger Islamic history. As reviewed in Marginalia, Stewart's work in Witness to Marvels challenges "modern tendencies to read these narratives as either fiction or history, making us aware of our blind spots. More importantly, [Stewart] expose[s] the distinct histories of these blind spots and draw attention to the modes of meaning-making that were deliberately overridden in the [Indian] subcontinent's colonial hagiography."

In keeping with Stewart's desire to make primary texts available for the areas of his study, the fantastical tales that form the nucleus of Witness to Marvels are now available in unabridged translations in Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Lands of the Eighteen Tides (2023). "Brimming with fantasy and excitement," these interlocking tales share common heroes and heroines that continue to shape religious sensibilities in the Bangla-speaking world. Faisal Devji, Professor of History at the University of Oxford, proclaimed Needle at the Bottom of the Sea a "major accomplishment, revealing a sophisticated understanding of inter religious and intercaste relations in the register of the marvelous." Needle at the Bottom of the Sea has also been reviewed by Wendy Doniger at the New York Review of Books, celebrating Stewart's ability to communicate complex tales of karma and the human spirit to modern audiences, and by Shyamasri Maji in Asian Review of Books, who declares the volume "a work of great scholarship."

Institutional Commitments
While at North Carolina State University (1986-2011), Stewart taught in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and was adjunct in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. With the instrumental help of Prof. David Gilmartin in the Department of History at North Carolina State University, Stewart founded and directed the North Carolina Center for South Asian Studies, a U.S. Department of Education Title IV National Resource Center (2000-2003, 2003-2006). While Director, Stewart served as Secretary to the American Institute of Indian Studies (1991-1995) and Trustee (1988-1995). Stewart collaborated on several projects developing digital tools for the study of Indic languages, including the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, a subset of the Digital South Asia Library, and Afroz Taj's Door Into Hindi.

More recently, Stewart was appointed Research Fellow, St. Antony's College, Oxford (2016-2017), and has been thrice named the J.P. and Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (2016-2017, 2022, 2023). Stewart has undertaken more than eight years of research residences in India and Bangladesh under the auspices of the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Stewart was one of the founders and first Director of the South Asia Summer Language Institute at the University of Wisconsin (2002-2006) and founded and directed the Bangla Language Institute in Dhaka on the campus of Independent University, Bangladesh (2006-2010). Stewart is a member of the American Literary Translators Association and is a life member of the Association for Asian Studies, among other institutional memberships.

Publications
Stewart has authored six monographs and major translations, an edited volume, and more than fifty articles and short translations.

Select Short Translations
“The Tales of Mānik Pīr: Protector of Cows in Bengal.” In Tales of God’s Friends: Islamic Hagiography in Translation. Edited by John Renard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, pp. 312-32.

“Tagore’s Vaiṣṇava Poetry, Nos. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.” Translated with Chase Twitchell. Brick: A Literary Journal 71 (Summer 2003).

and Robin Rinehart. “The Anonymous Āgama Prakāśa: Preface to a 19th c. Gujarati Polemic” In Tantra in Practice, edited by David Gordon White. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 266-85.

“Encountering the Smallpox Goddess: The Auspicious Song of Śītalā.” In Religions of India in Practice, edited byDonald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 389-98. Re- anthologized in Religions of Asia in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 79-87.

“The Exemplary Devotion of the ‘Servant of Hari’.” In Religions of India in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 564-77. Re-anthologized in Religions of Asia in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 136-49.

“The Goddess Ṣaṣṭhī Protects Children.” In Religions of India in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1995, 352-66.

“The Rescue of Two Drunkards.” In Religions of India in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1995, 375-88.

“Satya Pīr: Muslim Holy Man and Hindu God.” In Religions of India in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 578-97.