GREEVEN, Richard, as Ghulam 'Abbas Jilani.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Bungled Miracle: A Legend of Benares. First edition of this intriguing satire of the "eastern legend" genre, attributed to Richard Greeven, a Bombay civil servant with a serious professional interest in Indian folklore and religion. Copies are held by the British Library and Harvard only. The poem narrates a story, acknowledged in the tongue-in-cheek preface as being entirely fictitious and somewhat ludicrous, of a saint who performs miracles at the court of the local raja. Bungling his incantations to the heavens, he ends up showering the court with sweet delicacies, much to the raja's chagrin. When moves are made to arrest him, the saint destroys the palace, "making a raspberry tart of everything except himself" (p. x). Greeven's style is whimsical, playing with the reader at almost every juncture.Greeven was satirizing his own scholarly endeavours as much as poking fun at others. While wearing his academic hat, he wrote about folklore in the Benares Division, including in The Knights of the Broom and The Lay of Saint Amin and The Lord of Resin, both published in 1894.

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