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Bengali literature developed in the northeastern part of the Indian subcontinent in about the eighth/fourteenth century, when Bengali, also called Bangla, became a literary language. After 739/1338 Bengal was an independent sultanate ruled by Turko-Afghan elites based in the urban centres. Starting from 983/1575 the region was then progressively integrated into the Mughal empire and was entirely conquered in 1010/1610. During the late Mughal period (12th/18th century) the province became virtually autonomous. Bengal came under British control during the second half of the 12th/18th century. After the independence of 1947, the region was divided on a religious basis between the Indian state of West Bengal and East Pakistan. The war of 1971 led to the independence of East Pakistan that became the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
It is often claimed that Muslim patronage ushered Bengali poetry into being. There is little evidence of such courtly literature before the tenth/sixteenth century. Before the elaboration of an Islamic literature, the works of Hindu poets contained elements reflecting aspects of Islam in the regional culture, such as references to the sultan of the time or to characters inspired by stories from the early .The beginning of Bengali Muslim literature in eastern Bengal.
The first Bengali Muslim authors appear to have lived in the southeastern corner of Bengal, in the region of Chittagong. They were either Afghans culturally acclimated to Bengal, who used Bengali as a means of literary expression, or local Hindus recently converted to Islam. The sultanate (600-945/1204-1538) and the Afghan period (945-83/1538-75) saw the beginnings of a courtly culture that gradually integrated regional features, among which were the use of Bengali as a cultural language. But it was only in the Arakanese kingdom, which stretched along the coasts of southeastern present-day Bangladesh and the northwestern part of Myanmar, that regional Muslim elites of the cities and rural areas used Bengali for literary purposes. The language and prosody were the same as that of earlier and contemporary Hindu poets. Changes occurred mainly in the themes, which were now taken from Persian literature, and through the creation or reinterpretation of existing literary forms. Unlike the Urdu poets, Bengali authors never adopted Arabic-Persian prosody. There were occasional late (thirteenth/nineteenth-century) attempts to use the Arabic script to transcribe Bengali. Formally speaking, the only visible impact of an Islamicate literary culture on Bengali was the practice of arranging the pages of manuscripts or printed books in order to read them from right to left.
The first author to leave a substantial oeuvre whose date and geographical location can be firmly established is Sayyid Sul?an, who lived at the end of the tenth/sixteenth century. He was a rural religious figure who produced many texts in Bengali, in a wide range of literary forms, from narrative poems called panchali to short lyric poems. He is representative of the religious mind of the rural gentry of the late tenth/sixteenth century. During this period, Islam spread primarily among rural populations. Even in religious writings, the language was largely the same as that of Hindu poets. Sayyid Sul?an’s Nabivansha (“The line of the Prophets,” c. 992-4/1584-6) and his treatise on spiritual practices entitled Jnanapradipa (“The lamp of knowledge”) contain many elements borrowed directly from Hindu mythology and yoga. These are usually reinterpreted in order to fit the framework of Islamic theology. Sul?an’s sources are Arabic and Persian texts, which he does not name precisely. His audience seems to have been the rural populations of Chittagong newly converted to Islam.
Sul?an’s works strongly influenced authors who lived in Chittagong during the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries. His disciple Mu?ammad Khan is a major figure among those authors. His works were read in Chittagong and the neighbouring region of Comilla. He completed the narrative of his master with his Maqtul Husayn, an epic and elegiac poem on the death of the Prophet’s grandson at the battle of Karbala. Mu?ammad Khan was also the first Muslim author to compose an allegorical poem, the Satya Kalivivadasanvada (“The disputation between the Golden and the Iron Ages,” 1045/1635). We find few references in these texts to the political context in which they were composed.
Another important literary trend of the Muslim Bengali literature of this period is linked to the prolific man of letters Alawal. Unlike Sayyid Sul?an, Alawal was an urban poet, who wrote for wealthy Muslim dignitaries of the Buddhist kings of Arakan. His texts are all transpositions from eastern literary Hindi, also called Avadhi, and Persian into Bengali. We can draw the outlines of his literary career from information available in his works. His poetry is refined and erudite. In addition to the ethical and religious concerns evidenced in his texts, he provides valuable insights into the courtly culture of his time. The most striking feature is the integration of Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, and Bengali literary traditions in a single adab or cultural ethos adapted to the needs of the cosmopolitan environment of Mrauk U, the capital of the Arakanese kingdom. Even after the conquest of Chittagong by the Mughals, in 1077/1666, Alawal’s texts were widely distributed and read in the region. He remained the model of a court poet, and many authors composed panchalis inspired by Persian mathnawis, using his highly Sanskritised style.
In the northeastern regions of Comilla and Sylhet, Bengali literature developed in a way similar to that in Chittagong, but there were few explicit interactions, in terms of the circulation of texts, among the three regions. Shaykh Chand was a major author in Comilla, which was part of the Tripura kingdom ruled by the Hindu dynasty of the Manikyas. He played a role comparable to Sayyid Sul?an, by providing the rural readership with a voluminous Rasulacarita (“Life of the prophets”) and Sufi treatises such as the Talib-nama (“The book of the seeker”). Judging from the many manuscripts of his texts collected in Comilla, Shaykh Chand remained very popular until the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the region of Sylhet, a quasi-autonomous tradition is traceable from the twelfth/eighteenth century. A script found only there, the Sylhet nagari, was designed by Muslim copyists. The genres represented are the same as in Comilla and Chittagong, that is, lives of the prophets, treatises on spiritual practices and fiqh, and padas.
2. Muslim Bengali literature in West Bengal
Even though Chittagong literature circulated in print in Calcutta during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, another tradition prevailed among the Muslims of the western part of Bengal. In the mid-twelfth/eighteenth century, Shah Ghariballah composed texts on themes already existing in East Bengal, such as the battle of Karbala and the story of Layli and Majnun. He does not seem to have been familiar with the Chittagong versions of these stories, and his sources were Persian or Hindi texts. His idiom differs from that used in eastern Bengal. It contains Hindi and Persian words and expressions and was later referred to as Musulmani Bengali, dobhasi (“containing two languages”), or mishrabhasariti (“style of the mixed language”). The direct successor of Shah Ghariballah, Sayyid Hamza (ca 1144-1222/1732-1808), shifted from the Sanskritised idiom to that of his predecessor, whose epic poem Amir Hamza he completed in 1201 of the Bengali calendar (c. 1209/1794). The dobhasi literature was very popular, and many texts were distributed from Battala, in northern Calcutta, where cheap books were printed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another successful kind of text that developed with the advent of printing was the literature on Satya Pir, a mythical saint worshiped by Hindus and Muslims alike for his ability to bring wealth and comfort. Many manuscripts containing versions of the tales about this religious figure are also kept in the collections of West Bengal and Bangladesh.
3. The formation of modern Bengali Muslim literature in colonial Bengal
During the second half of the nineteenth century, some authors who wished to enter the literary circles of Calcutta adopted the new idiom and genres of the Hindu literati. At this time, Western forms such as the novel and the use of prose, and sonnet and blank verse in poetry, as well as the direct expression of social concerns changed profoundly the way literature was conceived. Pre-modern forms have continued in use up to the present, but a break did occur between the ancient and the new tradition. The late integration of Bengali Muslims into the British educational system limited the impact of Muslim authors on the intellectual life of Bengal. The religious themes inherited from the dobhasi literature were still the main sources of inspiration for many Muslim poets and novelists. Mir Musharraf Husayn (1848-1911) is the most important author of this period. He tried all the genres of his time and wrote an autobiography that is a landmark in Bengali literature. Muslim authors also wrote plays, such as Mir Musharraf Husayn’s Vasantakumari natak (“The play of Vasantakumari,” 1873), Abd al-Karim’s Jagatmohini (“The world-enchanting,” 1875), and Qadir Ali’s Mohinipremapash (“Mohini’s love-lace,” 1881). The plays were fashioned according to the rules of Sanskrit dramaturgy and imitated contemporary Hindu playwrights (e.g., Dinabandhu’s (1829-1874) Nil darpana, (“The indigo planting mirror,” 1860), and Husain’s Jamidar darpan, (“The mirror of the landlord,” 1873).
Bengali Muslims engaged in the publication of several periodicals in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. Periodicals such as Kohinur (“The mountain of light,” named after a famous Indian diamond, which belonged to various rulers and is now part of British crown jewels), first published in 1898, allowed men of letters and intellectuals to share their points of view and to debate topics in literature, religion, politics, and the complex question of the identity of Bengali Muslims. The need of Muslims to acknowledge their role as members of Bengali society in order to enhance social unity and offset divisive British social policy became a central issue for the essayists. The editors were Muslims, but many contributors were Hindus. In the field of religion, the efforts of Muslim authors were directed mainly towards refuting anti-Muslim pamphlets written by Christian missionaries. In this connection, some Hindu and Brahmo (members of a religious reformist movement formed by the urban elites of Bengal during the first half of the 19th century) scholars produced valuable works on Islam, such as the first Bengali translation of the Quran, in 1881, by Girishchandra Sen (1834-1910). The latter also wrote a life of the Prophet entitled Mahapurus Muhammader jivan-carit (“The life of the great man Mu?ammad,” 1885). The many biographies of the Prophet written during the second half of the nineteenth century helped shape the identity of Bengali Muslims by providing iconic models of individual behaviour.
The opinions of Sunni reformist movements of various tendencies such as the Deobandi, the regional Faradi or the Barelwi, had some influence on the ideology of the writers of essays and other nonfiction of this period, but novelists and poets seem to have maintained their autonomy, putting forward such issues as the social status of women, education, and child marriage.
During the decades preceding the independence of India and Pakistan, the poet and songwriter Qadi Nadhr al-Islam became a major figure. He was inspired by Hindu devotional songs and by adaptations of the Persian poems of Hafiz Shirazi. The energy generated by the uprising that is the theme of his famous poem Bidrohi (“The rebel,” 1922) is a crucial aspect of his art and inspired many poets who came after him.
4. Bengali literature in Pakistan and Bangladesh
The formation of a new Bengali Muslim identity resulted from the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. On the one hand, Bengali Muslims gained the opportunity to elaborate their own literary idiom, distinct from that of Hindus, but on the other, Urdu, not Bengali, was the official language of Pakistan. Other social and political issues crystallised around that of the recognition of the status of Bengali as a national language in Pakistan by the government. This led to the “movement for the language” (Bhasha Andolan) and its violent repression in 1952, vividly depicted in Jahira Rayhana’s novel Arek phalgun (“Another month of Phalgun, “1969, Phalgun being the twelfth month of the North Indian Hindu calendar, falling in February-March). Important novelists of this period are Abu al-Mansur Ahmad (1898-1979), Abu Ishaq (1926-2003), Akbar Husayn (1917-81), Qazi Afsar al-Din (1921-75), Abu Rushd (b. 1919), Shawkat Uthman (1917-98), and Sayyid Waliallah (1922-1971), whose Lalasalu (“Tree without roots,” 1948) is an emblematic novel of this period. It tells the story of a religious man who settles in a village and relies for his living upon the villagers’ beliefs in the power of the tomb of a local saint. Depictions of rural society and the criticism of superstitions are often encountered in the literature of the years that followed partition. The movement for the recognition of the Bengali language produced a new creative impulse that lasted until 1958, when martial law was imposed by Iskander Mirza (1899-1969) and Ayyub Khan (1907-74).
The latter’s strict military regime of the 1960s prohibited novelists from freely depicting contemporary society. Many East Pakistani historical novels were aimed at condemning the ill-treatment endured by Bengalis. Authors evincing strong Marxist ideology, such as Abd al-Ghaffar Chaudhuri (1934-), who wrote Chandradvipera upakhyan (“The story of Chandradvapa”) during the 1950s and published it as book in 1960, and the bold and prolific novelist Satyen Sen (1907-81), or Shawkat Uthman (1919-98), the author of Kritadasera hasi (“The slave’s laughter,” 1962), nourished the revolutionary imaginary on the path to independence. But when the moment of the fight for independence arrived in the late 1960s, it was through poetry that a real aesthetics of the uprising, already present in the work of Nadhr al-Islam, reached its fullest development. Swadhinata tumi (“Freedom, you are…,” 1972) by Shams al-Ra?man (Shamsur Rahman) (1929-2006) is the most acclaimed poem on independence. The celebration of the 21 February, the date of the general strike of 1952 for the recognition of Bengali as a national language, remains an occasion for poets to declaim their compositions inspired by the fight for independence.
The post-independence period produced many novels and anthologies of poems on the theme of the war of 1971. Novels such as Anvar Pasha’s (1928-71) Raiphela roti aorata (“Guns, bread, and women,” 1973), Shawkat Ushman’s Jahannama haite biday (“A farewell to Hell,” 1971), Shawkat Ali’s (1936-) Yatra on the “black night” of 25 March 1971, Sayyid Shams al-Haq’s Nisiddha loban (“The forbidden salt,” 1981) are examples of this trend. Among the writers of the 1970s and 1980s, two women novelists are prominent, Selina Husayn (b. 1947) and Rijiya Ra?man (b. 1939). Among the works of the latter is Va? theke Bangla (“From the Vam’s to Bengal,” 1987), an historical novel dealing with the history of the Bengali people from ancient times to 1971.
Even though rural life has remained central to the setting of Bengali novels and poetry up to the present, the urban social environment increasingly influenced authors living in Dacca. The use of dialect in the dialogues of short stories and novels is characteristic of recent Bangladeshi literature. Humayun A?mad (b. 1948) and Imdad al-Haq Milan (b. 1955) are two prolific and popular authors of the last decades who draw on contemporary events for their short stories and novels. Al-Mahmud (b. 1936) is recognised by critics for his poetry, short stories, and, since the 1990s, his novels. –Internet.
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