Bengali Culture: Over a Thousand Years

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THE BEGINNING

When the Greek king Menander met the Buddhist sage Nagasena, the latter asked him, ‘Maharaj, you have come in a chariot. But what is a chariot?’ In reply, the king explained that a chariot was a vehicle on wheels drawn by horses. The sage asked, ‘Is the horse the same as the chariot, then?’ ‘No’, said the king. Were the wheels the same as the chariot? No again, and so it went. If it is so tricky to come up with a definition of a chariot, it may seem virtually impossible to define a culture. Indeed, the various definitions of culture offered by sociologists are by no means either simple or straightforward. Nor very concise. Culture is not something you can define in clear-cut, unambiguous terms. It is not made up of one or two things, it is an infinitely complex concept.

The definition of culture formulated by Edward Taylor in the second half of the 19th century is generally accepted as the classic definition. According to that definition, a comprehensive pattern of beliefs, conduct, behaviour and knowledge may be called ‘culture’. Language, literature, ideas, religion and beliefs; codes of behaviour, social values and rules; festivals and rituals; art; and the tools needed in everyday life—all this makes up a culture. The refinements, accomplishments and habits that one picks up as a social being are also part of culture. Like the horses and the wheels of the chariot, these individual components of culture are visible enough. It is not quite as easy to define a culture in its entirety, which develops gradually over centuries. It is like the air that we breathe in, which we can feel all the time but cannot see.

We are born as animals. It is culture that makes us human. It makes us social creatures. It is through culture that we come to possess values, thinking minds and attitudes, as well as concepts and ideas. It is culture that refines our minds and tastes. On the other hand, certain kinds of cultural environment can turn human beings into beasts. In a word, it is culture that makes us what we are. It is difficult to give a clear definition of culture, and I will not try to do so. Instead, I will straight away embark on writing a history of culture. I assume that readers will figure out what I am talking about as they make their way through the book.

But even if we do not attempt a definition of Bengali culture, it is necessary to set out the defining limits of this culture if one must write a history of it, though of course, I must say again, it is not an easy thing to do. Not easy, because though the myriad components of a culture catch our eyes, whether they combine into a clear pattern, and from what point of time in history they do so, is not always so clear. The flowers with which Time has strung the garland of Bengali culture are prominent enough, but the thing of beauty created out of them in the form of the garland is not as clearly perceptible. That is why I will start my discussion with the horse and the wheel, rather than the chariot. We will try to see when this culture started acquiring a character of its own, what its components were, when they became integrated and how they have changed with time. I trust that a general idea of Bengali culture will emerge from these discussions.

It is of course important to point out right at the beginning that Bengali culture is not homogeneous or monolithic. Just as Bengali society is fragmented into many sections, Bengali culture is also tinged with many hues. Going by political boundaries, this society can now be divided into two almost equal parts. On religious lines, too, this society is divided—mainly between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Yet, those are not the only divisions. For, within the same religious community there are many walls of separation. The community of upper-caste Hindus, for instance, does not at all resemble that of lower-caste Hindus, though their gods and goddesses may bear the same names. Even small differences in religious belief may be enough to create unbridgeable distances between different sections, and between individuals. So much so that people divided by such beliefs may not be able to accept food from each other.

A famous Bengali poet had the surname ‘Dutt’ and was a ‘Kayastha’ by caste (jati). This poet strung a new chord in Bengali culture. Yet, the act of adopting a different religion cast him far out of the pale of his own community. The Bengali society of his time did not exactly embrace him with open arms, despite his gigantic contribution to Bengali literature. Rabindranath Tagore was responsible for putting Bengali in the global literary map. But it took a long time for the Bengali Muslim community to accept him as one of its own. Even a section of Bengali Hindus took a long time to accept him without reservation. The fog of religious belief was able to cloud up even the sun-like brilliance of his genius. Differences of religion and caste apart, there are barriers between rural and urban Bengali communities. The differences in dialect between the different regions in Bengal are also not negligible. In sum, Bengali society does not signify a uniform, undivided community.

That is why one must see Bengali culture as one that belongs to Hindus, Muslims, upper-caste Hindus, lower-caste Hindus, Vaishnavas, Shaktas, Bauls, Ashrafs (lower-class Muslims), Atrafs (elite Muslims), Buddhists and Christians. The city dweller and the villager, the rich and the poor, this culture belongs to them all. It is therefore not possible to draw the outlines of this culture in simple, straightforward strokes. The cooking of eastern Bengal is quite distinct from that of western Bengal, and Bengali Hindu cuisine differs from Bengali Muslim cuisine. The folk songs of eastern Bengal are different from the folk songs of central Bengal; the folk songs of northern Bengal differ from those of western Bengal. The Baul songs of Kushtia are significantly different from the Baul songs of Birbhum. The dance steps of Santhals of eastern Bengal differ from those of western Bengal. These differences are not always subtle. In many cases they are sharp and unmistakable. Indeed, sometimes the gulf is so deep that it is hard to identify the different parts as pieces of the same culture.

Apart from everything else, this culture does not have a fixed or unchanging identity. Nor does it stand still at any particular point. It has evolved with time. Nevertheless, the most important thing that must be considered is whether there is some common ground despite all the widely differing components and particularities of this culture. Important, because it is the shared characteristics that give Bengali culture its distinctiveness. In the opinion of scholars, there are unmistakable similarities that mark many aspects of Bengali culture despite the differences. For instance, there is noticeable unity in the literature, music, eating habits, dwelling layouts, clothes, and even the facial features of Bengalis. The thatched huts of Bengal are the same everywhere, for Hindus and Muslims alike. Rice and fish continue to be the staple of all Bengalis. In the 21st century era of globalisation, Bengalis are eating hot-dogs, drinking Coke and tucking into Thai and Chinese food, but the fish-and-rice meal has not lost its pride of place.

In the words of Rabindranath Tagore

The history of Bengal is the history of fragmentation. Eastern and western Bengal, Rarh and Varendra, these are not simply geographical divisions; divisions of hearts and minds were meshed up with them, and social unity was also absent. Yet through it all there runs a strain of unity, and that is the unity of language. What defines us as being Bengali is that we happen to speak Bengali.

In other words, the most important shared characteristic of Bengali culture is the language. Despite all the social differences, Bengali is the language of all Bengalis. And so the point of origin of the Bengali language is what marks the beginning of Bengali culture. Which is not to say that we refuse to recognise the cultural attributes of the people who inhabited the landmass that is now home to Bengalis long before the Bengali language was actually born. Indeed, it is on the foundation laid in the pre-Bengali age that Bengali culture has been truly built.

Language apart, there is another important dimension to this culture—its geographical identity. Bengali culture belongs to the land where people speak in the Bengali language. One must accept Bengali culture as beginning at that point in history when a language called Bengali came into being and a region came to be identified as ‘Bengal’. But when was the Bengali language born? When did a region come to be known as Bengal? And when did the people of that region start being called Bengalis?

Moment of Birth

Writers inspired by nationalist ideals have in recent times claimed Bengali culture to be very old, even as old as 5,000 years. In our view, the culture is not so ancient at all. For, not even the parent language of Bengali was born that far back into the past, let alone what we know as Bengali. In truth, it is doubtful if the Bengali language is even a thousandyears old. Doubtful, because a language does not acquire its distinctive features in a day—not even in a century. If this is accepted as a given, then what Nihar Ranjan Roy has called Bangalir Itihash (The History of the Bengalis) cannot truly be described as the history of either Bengalis or Bengali culture. For, in the time span that he has written about, the language of this region had not really come into its own as one recognisable as the Bengali language. In ancient times, even the region as a whole had not come to be recognised as Bengal or ‘Vangabhumi’. The area that we now know as home to the Bengali-speaking people was then still divided into smaller areas known as Gaur, Varendri, Rarh, Samatata, Sumha, Vanga and so on. These smaller areas did not become integrated into an undivided ‘Vanga’ during the time of the Palas, the Senas and the Varmans. Therefore, it is not really logical to speak of the people who lived in these areas in those times as Bengalis. Of course, there is no gainsaying the fact that the cultural and anthropological traditions of those ancient pre-Bengali people were not washed away to make way for a new culture. Rather, it was on the basis of that ancient culture that in later centuries was built the edifice of Bengali culture with varied and new ingredients.

Thus, the blood of the Adivasis who lived here in the distant past still flows in our veins. It was before the birth of Christ that the Aryans pitched their first settlements in this land, initially in Rarh and then in Varendri. Before their time, it was not just the Austric people who lived here. The land was home to Dravidians and to people of Chinese-Mongoloid origin. There was much mingling of bloodlines and of languages between the peoples of these various anthropological groups. The bloodlines of the Aryans and later those of Semitic groups and of Central Asian communities enriched this great commingling. And it is not as if there was no fusion with European bloodlines at all. Just as the genes of the modern Bengali carry the history of this intermingling of races, so the present-day Bengali carries ingredients from the languages spoken by these varied anthropological groups.

The Aryans were not the rulers of this land when they made their first permanent settlements here. Later, however, it was they who ruled for centuries on end. And it was the language they spoke that the people of this region gradually made their own. Yet some words and other features of the older language inevitably influenced the language brought in by the Aryans. The Bengali language is surmised to have emerged, through a process of evolution, some 1,500 years after the Aryans arrived in the region, though the hill people inhabiting the northern and eastern reaches had not yet accepted the language as their own. And in fact they still retain their distinctiveness in the matter of language. But the people of the plains have embraced Bengali as their language, showing in this act of acceptance their willingness to assimilate influences from other cultures. When Muslims arrived from Central and West Asia, they were once again considerably influenced by the languages of the newcomers.

The people of this region have not been able to discard many aspects of the culture that existed before the birth of the Bengali language. For instance, people of the ‘pre-Bengali’ era ate fish and rice, which, as we have already said, is a habit we have not grown out of. The Aryans introduced new methods of farming and previously unknown foods among the older inhabitants of the land. The Mughals, the Pathans, the Turks and the Arabs also brought new food habits. Even the Portuguese and the English brought new kinds of food with them. Yet Bengalis remain as loyal as ever to their fish and rice. The cuisine, too, maintains a continuity with ancient times. The food described in 12th century Udbhat Slokas is not much different from the food that Bengalis eat today. The pattern of thatched homes in the countryside has survived for centuries. So we must accept that the culture of ancient times forms the basis for the Bengali culture that has taken shape in the past 1,000 years. The structure is young, but it stands on the foundation of the ‘pre-Bengali’ tradition.

Let us now turn our attention to the time of the birth of the Bengali language, which forms the basis of Bengali culture. Scholars are divided on whether the Charyapada poems, which provide the oldest extant examples of the language, are a thousand years old. Haraprasad Shastri retrieved the text of the Charyapada from the library of the royal court of Nepal at the beginning of the 20th century and claimed that the poems were samples of Bengali that was a thousand years old. However, linguists such as Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyay and Sukumar Sen have not been able to accept that the Charyapada poems are quite so old. Analysing the history of how the literary variations of Prakrit, known as the apabhramshas (deviations), developed into regional languages, they place the Charyapada poems between the 10th and the 12th centuries. On the other hand, Muhammad Shahidullah has claimed that the Charyapada poems were written between the 7th and the 8th centuries, going by references to people or facts in the poems. His analysis does not pay too much attention to the chronology of the evolution of the new Indo-Aryan language in northern and eastern India.

Though Muhammad Shahidullah and Haraprasad Shastri have tried to push back the date of the composition of the Charyapada, they acknowledge that the language of these poems cannot really be described as Bengali. In later discussions we shall see that despite the appearance of some distinctive traits of the Bengali language, this language still had many features in common with the Oriya and the Assamese languages. This means that the Bengali language emerged after the Charyapada poems were written. If these poems are a thousand years old, then Bengali must be younger. Therefore, if the Bengali language is taken to be the greatest common factor in Bengali culture, it is reasonable to suppose that this culture is less than a thousand years old. Still, let us push aside these debates and assume, for the sake of a round figure, that this culture is about a thousand years old.

Name of the Land

From when did the land that is home to Bengali culture come to be known as ‘Bengal’? The extensive area that is known as Bengal, or ‘Vanga Desh’, was, even 700 or 800 years ago divided into various regions bearing different names. In the second half of the 14th century, Sultan Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah brought these areas under a single administrative regime. Until then, these areas were not recognised as forming an undivided political territory. The land had been divided into several small, politically independent units, and even their names were not constant. A few standardised place names, however, kept coming back in history. These were Gaur, Rarh, Vanga, Sumha, Varendri, Pundra, Harikela, Samatata and so on. Of these, Gaur, Varendri and Vanga appear to be the oldest and most frequently used place names. But exactly how old were they?

Though the famous ancient Indian grammarian Panini’s Ashtadhyayi mentions ‘Gaur’, it does not mention ‘Vanga’. Panini’s time was some five centuries before the birth of Christ. But when Patanjali wrote his annotations for Ashtadhyayi, 200 or 300 years later, he mentioned ‘Vanga’. Not just ‘Vanga’, he also spoke of Anga, Sumha, Pundra, Magadha and Kalinga.

1.1 The kingdoms that together made up Bengal

Aitareya Brahmana was also written before the birth of Christ. The text mentions Pundra, but not Vanga. Pundra was at that time taken to mark the eastern limits of Aryan settlements. Sukumar Sen has noted the use of the word ‘Vanga’ even in the Vedas. But his illustration involves a compound word of which ‘Vanga’ is a component, which leaves room for doubt about whether it is actually the same word. ‘Gaur’ and ‘Vanga’ occur even in the Mahabharata, which started being composed in the pre-Christian era. But the Mahabharata contains many interpolations and therefore cannot perhaps be completely relied on.

In the 4th century AD, – Samudragupta was the emperor of India. The eulogy of the king composed by the poet Harishen has a description of Bengal, but ‘Gaur’ and ‘Vanga’ are not mentioned; the word used is ‘Samatata’. On the other hand, Kalidasa, writing just after the reign of Samudragupta, mentions Gaur, Vanga and Sumha while describing Rahgu’s exploits in his Raghuvamsa. But he does not mention Samatata. He describes Gaur as hugging the sea coast, which seems to imply that he saw Vanga as part of Gaur. Vatsayan, a near contemporary, praises soft-natured, romantic and lithe Bengali women in his well known work Kamasutra. But instead of Vanga, the word he uses is Gaur. Kautilya’s Arthashastra also mentions Gaur.

The use of all these varied place names suggests that though there was an area called Vanga, the word ‘Vanga’, even if it was in use, was not very popular in areas outside the region known as Vanga in ancient times. It could also be that the part of Bengal that these writers were referring to was called Gaur and not Vanga, which was, in ancient times, clearly only southern Bengal. Several centuries later, even the Pala and the Sena kings were known not as rulers of Vanga but of Gaur. Whether eastern and southern Bengal were under their rule is also open to doubt.

At the end of the Sena dynasty’s rule, when the Turks conquered Bengal at the dawn of the 13th century, the land was not yet known as Vanga. The region that the Turks conquered was called Gaur, not Vanga. Its capital, named after Lakshman (Lakkhon, as Bengalis would pronounce it) Sena, was Lakhnauti (Lakkhonabati). Bakhtiar Khilji had ‘Gaur Vijay’ inscribed in Sanskrit on the coin that he introduced after his conquest. The first Muslim historians did not also mention any area called ‘Bangala’. But Vanga existed even then, and even the word ‘Bangal’ was in use. There are at least two pieces of evidence that prove this. Bhusukpada, one of the Charyapada poets writing around this time, mentioned a raga called ‘Bangal’ in one of his poems. There may be a difference of opinion over the time of Bhusukpada, but it is known for sure that Marco Polo visited India, if not Bengal, towards the end of the 13th century. He referred to ‘Bangala’ in his memoirs. He wrote that this land lay close to India (Bharatvarsha) and that its people worshipped idols and spoke a strange language. Some 60 to 70 years later, Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah for the first time brought Gaur, Varendri, Sumha, Samatata and Vanga under a single rule. He then declared himself ‘Shahe Bangalian’, meaning the ‘Sultan of the Bengalis’. According to the 14th century historian Shams-i-Siraj Afif, he assumed this title after conquering Sonargaon. This conquest was made in 1352.

This, however, does not incontrovertibly support the conclusion that Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah became the sultan of the whole of Bengal or that he called his sultanate ‘Bangala’. Rather, it could well be that he assumed the title to commemorate his conquest of ‘Vanga’ or eastern Bengal. Whatever that may be, it was after this event that that this extensive landmass was gradually brought under a single administration and started being known as ‘Bangala’. But that did not happen in a day, or even in a century.

Alauddin Hossein Shah, Bengal’s best-known sultan in the Middle Ages, ruled at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century. More than one Bengali poet have sung paeans in his praise. Vidyapati of Mithila also praised him in one of his poems. Remarkably, however, none of these poets called him the sultan of ‘Vanga’. They described him as the king or sultan of Gaur. Vidyapati eulogised him as the ruler of ‘Pancha-Gaur’. There is some debate on whether Vidyapati’s couplet refers to Hossein Shah or his son Nasir Shah, but there is no room for doubt about what he means by ‘Pancha-Gaur’. Though the expression does have another meaning, here the poet uses it to signify greater Bengal. It is noteworthy that he identifies greater Bengal not as ‘Pancha-Vanga’ but ‘Pancha-Gaur’. This offers indirect proof of the greater importance and wider recognition of Gaur. After Vidyapati, Hossein Shah finds undisputed mention in the work of Jashoraj Khan or Maladhar Basu. He, too, spoke not of Vanga but of Pancha-Gaur as Hossein Shah’s territory. Even when Mukundaram Chakraborty wrote his Chandimangal in the 16th century, he referred separately to Gaur, Vanga and Utkal while writing of Man Singh. From his description, it appears that Vanga in his time still generally meant southern Bengal. That means that 150 years after Ilyas Shah declared himself sultan of the Bengalis, Vanga still had not come to mean the whole of Bengal. Indeed, it was only in the Mughal period, in the late 16th century, that the entire region officially came to be known as Subah Bangalah. Contemporary European travellers also referred to it as Bengal.

But though the province was officially known as Subah Bangalah, it is only in the 18th century, and not before, that one notes the extensive use in written Bengali of ‘Bangala’ as meaning greater Bengal. It was probably the poet Bharatchandra who for the first time, and repeatedly, used the word ‘Bangala’ in this sense. Describing the raids of marauding Maratha gangs, called Borgis in Bengal, he wrote in Annadamangal (1752): ‘Their plunders made paupers of the people of Bangala’. Describing Man Singh’s meeting with Bhabananda Majumdar after the former’s arrival in Bengal, he wrote: ‘Man Singh ferreted out all information regarding Bangala by questioning him.’ When seeking an account of Bengal from Man Singh, Jahangir says: ‘Tell us Man Singh Ray, you travelled to Bangala—how did you find that land?’

So we see that Bharatchandra referred to the whole of Bengal as ‘Bangala’ in these lines. It is quite clear that he used the word Bangala, instead of Vanga, in imitation of the official Mughal name for the province, ‘Subah Bangalah’. There is, however, no definite information about how Vanga became Bangala. According to some scholars, the word ‘Bangal’ was formed by the addition of the suffix ‘al’ to the proper noun ‘Vanga’. According to Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay and Sukumar Sen, the earliest use of the word Bangal can be found in an edict dating back to the 11th-12th centuries. But there may be some doubt about whether the word, occurring in a compound expression, was actually ‘Bangal’. However, as we have already said, the first undisputed use of the word ‘Bangal’ can be found in a Charyapada poem by Bhusukpada, in which he referred to a raga as Bangal. In another couplet, he referred to himself as a ‘Bangali’: ‘Today, Bhusuk, you are a Bangali/A Chandal has made away with your wife’ (adapted from a translation into modern Bengali by Sukumar Sen).

On a cursory reading, Bhusukpada appears to call himself a Bengali in these lines. In reality, however, the words ‘Bang-a-li’ or ‘Banga-li’ were not yet in use as meaning inhabitants of Vanga. Scholars surmise that Bhusukpada might have used the word here as meaning degraded, lowly, banished from the pale of caste. He says: ‘A Chandal has taken your wife.’ It appears, then, that he has become a ‘Bangali’ because he has lost his wife to a Chandal. In this interpretation, the word implies loss of caste, not his identity as a Bengali. The Sanskrit scriptures of the time also warned: Do not go to Vanga, for that is the land of the fallen. This, too, to an extent helps us to understand the meaning of Bhusukpada’s use of the word ‘Bangal’.

The first use of the word Bangal as meaning an inhabitant of Vanga can be seen during the 14th-15th centuries. It was not just Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah who was known as ‘Shahe Bangalian’. A famous dervish called Nur Qutb-e-Alam was also known as ‘Alam Bangali’. He did not, however, live in southern Bengal. His grave was in Pandua. Why, in spite of this, he was called a Bengali is not known. But these were only a few exceptions, and the people of the region had not yet come to be called Bengalis. Mukundaram Chakraborty did use the word ‘Bang-al’ in his Chandimangal at the end of the 16th century. But he used it as referring to the people of southern or eastern Bengal, not the people of greater Bengal. He writes, for instance: ‘Kandere Bangal bhai bafoi bafoi’ (The Bangal weeps loudly).

In the same century, ‘Bangal’ was also used in Brindabandas’s Chaitanyabhagavat to refer to the inhabitants of eastern Bengal. Nearly two centuries later, it was Bharatchandra Ray who for the first time used ‘Bangali’ to refer to the people of the whole of Bengal: ‘Bangalira kato bhalo pashchimar ghare’ (Bengalis are so much more sporting when they travel west, that is, the western provinces of India).

Elsewhere, he introduced Bhabananda Majumdar as a ‘Bangali Baman’ (Bengali Brahmin). According to the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, the use of ‘Bangali’ as meaning the people of Bengal is not observed in written sources before Bharatchandra. However, Ahmed Sharif has claimed that the word was used in a work by Saiyid Sultan around 1584—‘It is our misfortune to be born as Bengalis in Vanga. Bengalis use Arabic words without any clue to their meaning.’

Here, the word used for ‘Bengali’ is ‘Bangali’. But Ahmed Sharif has not clarified whether the cited couplet was an interpolation, nor has he disclosed the date of the manuscript that he used. But the spelling and language do not suggest that the manuscript is quite so old.

Bengalis as Speakers of the Bengali Language

It will be easier to get a grasp of what we describe as Bengali culture if we know when it was that the language spoken in the land came to be known as ‘Bangla’ (Bengali), and the people who spoke it, as ‘Bangalis’ (Bengalis). We have said before that the language in which the Charyapada poems were written cannot really be called Bengali. It would be more correct to rather see it as a sort of proto-language that came just before Bengali. It was what the language of the Aryans had evolved into, after many changes, in the region. The language spoken by the Aryans, according to philologists, was Prakrit. This spoken language took on a different name in each of the different regions of north India, defined by characteristics peculiar to that region. The Prakrit spoken in the east was known as Magadhi Prakrit. Muhammad Shahidullah described the branch of Prakrit prevelant in the Bengal region as ‘Gauri Prakrit’. This Prakrit gradually evolved into apabhramsa, and then into abahatta, which is, more or less, the language of the Charyapada.

Just as some words and other characteristics of the Bengali language can be noticed in the language of the Charya poems, some words and other characteristics of the Assamese and Oriya languages are also evident in this language. We cannot, therefore, describe this language indisputably as Bengali. It was only in the 14th and 15th centuries that Bengali began to emerge as a distinct language. This is quite clear when one examines the language of Borhu Chandidas’s Srikrishnakeertan. This means that roughly at the time when the regions of Gaur, Vanga, Varendri and so on became incorporated into greater Bengal (Bangalah), the language of the land became clearly recognisable as Bengali. It was not yet, however, known by any specific name. The Bengali alphabet also acquired its own peculiarities during roughly the same period. Some scholars, though, claim that the Bengali script is older. But that does not appear to be a very logical conclusion. Two things must be kept in mind in this context. One, the script of a language cannot evolve before that language acquires its characteristics. Second, the scripts of the north Indian languages evolved from the Brahmi script and, therefore, might well share similarities. If one or two characters in a manuscript here or a stone inscription there appear to resemble a character in the Bengali script, it does not conclusively follow that the script is Bengali or indeed that the writing was in the Bengali language.

Even if we accept the 15th century Srikrishnakeertan as an example of Bengali free from Assamese and Oriya influences, the language was not yet known as Bengali (or Bangla, as Bengalis would say). Just as we do not give specific names to the dialects spoken in the different districts of the Bengal region. Sanskrit scholars of those times described these different regional tongues simply as ‘bhasha’, meaning local languages. A Sanskrit sloka, for instance, proclaimed that anyone listening to the Ramayana or the eighteen Puranas recited in bhasha – that is, in an unrefined local language – would be condemned to the ‘Rourab Narak’, the worst kind of hell.

Defying this scriptural injunction, many writers of the time translated the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the other Puranas and produced works on religious themes, such as the Mangalkavyas in Bengali. Yet, remarkably, none of these writers referred to their bhasha or language as Bangla bhasha or Bengali language.

The Bengali poets of the time, in fact, described their language as just bhasha, desi bhasha (regional language), or ‘ loukik’ bhasha (spoken language). For instance, in the early 16th century, the Mahabharata translator Srikar Nandy called the language ‘ desi bhasha’. What he wrote may be roughly translated as:

‘Recite this tale in the regional tongue

And so spread word of my feat in the world’.

Kabishekhar, who came after Srikar Nandy, called it ‘ loukik’ bhasha instead of desi bhasha. He exhorted his audience/readers not to laugh at his use of ‘ loukik bhasha’.

Even some 130-140 years after Kavishekhar, in the mid 17th century, ‘Bangla’ or Bengali had not gained currency as signifying the language of Bengal. Daulat Qazi referred to it as desi bhasha. Speak in the language of the land and in the rhythm of the panchalis, he said, so that everyone can easily understand. Abdul Hakim was a poet of the same century. Of all the medieval Bengali poets, it was probably he who took greatest pride in his Bengali identity and the Bengali language. But even he did not refer to it as ‘Bangla’. He called it ‘Bangabani’ (language of Bengal), desi bhasha and ‘Bangadeshi bakya’ (language of the land of Bengal). For those Muslims who, even though born in the land, did not claim Bengali as their own and who bore ill will towards the language, his verdict was rather harsh. Not only did he cast aspersions on the legitimacy of birth of people who detested the local language (deshi bhasha) even after having lived in the land for generations, he also advised them to leave for other shores.

Though Abdul Hakim did not describe the language as ‘Bangla’ (Bengali), Ahmed Sharif has claimed that another poet of the same century, Muttalib, referred to the language as ‘Bangala’ in 1639.

In rendering Islamic themes in Bangala

I accrue many sins, I am sure

The only consolation in this clash is that

The faithful will bless me when the words make sense to them.

From the spellings and the words used in the passage, these lines may well be taken to be interpolations. In the previous discussion we noted that it was Bharatchandra Ray, the greatest poet of the 18th century, who for the first time, and repeatedly, described greater Bengal as ‘Bangala’, and, more importantly, called the inhabitants of this land ‘Bangali’. Curiously, even he did not refer to the language of ‘Bangala’ as ‘Bangla’. His definition of the Bengali identity was, therefore, based on the land and not on language. Bharatchandra finished working on Annadamangal in 1752. Even as late as that he did not call the language he was using ‘Bangla’ and referred to it as just ‘bhasha’. Writing about his choice of Bengali rather than Hindustani or Farsi to report the conversation between Man Singh and Jahangir in Annadamangal, he wrote that those languages would be hard for his audience to understand, and so he would use ‘bhasha’ (in his case, Bengali) with a fair sprinkling of words from languages used by Muslims.

Even though Bharatchandra did not refer to the language of the Bengal region as Bengali, there is evidence in Portuguese and English works that it was more or less during his time that this language started becoming known as ‘Bangla’, or ‘Bangala’. While the poet was still alive, Manuel de Assumpcao called the language ‘Bengalla’ in the Bengali grammar and dictionary that he wrote. This book was printed in 1743, in Lisbon. When Nathaniel Halhed published his Bengali grammar 17 or 18 years after Bharatchandra’s death, he described the language as the ‘Bengal language’. Six years after the publication of Halhed’s grammar, when the East India Company’s book of laws translated by Jonathan Duncan was published, ‘Bangala’ was still translated into English as ‘Bengal language’.

Thereafter, the English titles in all the books of law that were published in Bengali translation until 1800 indicate that there was still some confusion among British officials on what the language of Bengal should be called in English. But there is no trace of uncertainty over the name of the language in the Bengali translations in these books of law. Jonathan Duncan’s book of law published in 1784 uses ‘Bangala’ for Bengal and ‘Bangla’ for Bengali. Between 1787 and 1800, in the books of law translated by George Meyer, George Frederick Cherie, Neil Edmonstone and Henry Petes Forster, the Bengali language is sometimes called ‘Bengal language’ in English and sometimes ‘Bengali’. But in Bengali texts, the language is always either ‘Bangla’ or ‘Bangala’. In the 1790s, Henry Petes Forster consistently wrote ‘Bangala’ while referring to the province. He also used ‘Bangladesh’. And in the title of his dictionary published in 1799-1801, he wrote ‘Bongalee’ to signify Bengali (a vocabulary, in two parts, English and Bongalee, and vice versâ).

Even outside the books of law around this time, the use of ‘Bangala’ and ‘Bangali’ can be noted. In Upson’s Engraji O Bangali Bocabulary (English and Bengali Vocabulary) published in 1793, ‘Bangali’ is used to mean the Bengali language. But this seems to be rather an exception, since the use of ‘Bangali’ to mean the Bengali language cannot be seen in any other writer’s work. Instead, some 4 years later, in John Miller’s Shikhyaguru (The Educator), the word used for the Bengali language was ‘Bangala’. The inhabitants of the land, the people who spoke the language, were called ‘Bangali’. Introducing his book, John Miller wrote: ‘Shikhyaguru is a new and suitable book in English (Engraji) and Bengali (Bangala) for Bengalis (Bangali) to learn English.’

From 1784 onwards, the words ‘Bangala’ and ‘Bangla’ started appearing even in the Bengali notices/advertisements that were published (I have discussed extensively the more than 2,000 advertisements that were published between 1784 and 1800 in my book Kalantare Bangla Gadya, or Bengali Prose at the Turn of the Century, 1993). Then, from 1801, when the authorities at Fort William started commissioning Bengali books, and the press run by Baptist missionaries at Serampore began printing books in the language, it was ‘Bangala’ that emerged as the standard word to signify the Bengali language.

As the above discussions make clear, Bengali as a language in its own right did not develop before the 13th-14th centuries. Nor had an undivided Bengal emerged before the 14th century. And the people of the province did not become known as Bengalis (‘Bangali’) before the 18th century. Hence, we may regard the culture that existed before the 13th-14th centuries as the bedrock of Bengali culture, but it was not yet truly Bengali in character. We have, therefore, focussed our attention on what came after that, the culture that is distinctly Bengali. But of course we must keep referring back to what came before, because we can only fathom the depths of this culture if we know about the culture that preceded it.

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE INDO-MUSLIM ERA

Beginning from the early 13th century, Bengal was under Muslim rule for some 550 years. One must qualify ‘Muslim rule’ before attempting to give an account of it. The sultans of this period were immigrants from different areas of Central and West Asia and spoke different languages. They did not bring with them any single monolithic culture. What they all had in common was their religious identity. They had not, however, travelled to Bengal to preach Islam or to establish Islamic rule. Besides, the communication and administration systems of the times were not such as to make possible any direct exchanges between the highest ruling authorities and the people. Whether a sultan was a good ruler or not, his influence on the ordinary people of the land was scant. In reality, numerous small and medium kings, dihidars, a service class of naibs and qazis, and village elders held sway over the land and its people. The zamindari system had not been introduced yet, but the land was divided up into fiefdoms controlled by a landed gentry. These landlords/chieftains administered their own territories, and hence it was they who really ruled. It was not even as if a common law held good everywhere. The landlords made over revenues to the sultan and supplied troops at the time of war. There were also times when they joined battle with the sultan in order to defy his authority. When the Muslims first arrived in Bengal, they did not have any strength in numbers. So the land continued to be ruled directly by the old Hindu petty kings and chieftains even after the arrival of the Muslims.

The life of the most famous medieval Bengali poet, Mukundaram Chakraborty, provides a telling illustration. When state persecution forced him to leave his ancestral village, he blamed a Muslim dihidar, Mahmoud Sharip. Yet, a closer scrutiny will show that the man whom he named as Mahmoud’s agent and held directly responsible for the harassment was not a Muslim but a ‘Rayjada’. That is, the son of a certain Ray, literally meaning a king, but also used as a surname by Hindus.

The system of administration that evolved during this time can be described as being run by Hindus under the overall supervision of Muslim sultans and a handful of Muslim nobles, the amirs and omrahs. There were times, of course, when the sultan’s wrath or his bounties touched lives in the countryside, but these were temporary and occasional events. It was really the old landowning families who ruled the land for generation after generation. It is thus more logical to see this age as one of Indo-Muslim rule rather than Muslim rule.

Indo-Muslim rule in Bengal started with Bakhtiar Khilji’s conquest. He occupied the capital of Gaur in 1204. There is no authoritative account of his conquest. But some 40 years after the event, a Muslim historian, Minhaz us-Siraj, arrived in Lakhnauti. From the history that he wrote on the basis of anecdotal evidence, which he collected from the people living in the city, we learn that Bakhtiar attacked Gaur with a force of nearly 10,000 cavalrymen. The popular belief was that he led a front-line assault group of just 17 soldiers of this force, and with their help attacked the capital ‘Nudia’, encountering little or no resistance as he stormed into not just the capital but the king’s palace itself. According to Richard Eaton, however, Khilji had with him not 17 but close to 200 soldiers. The old king, Lakshman Sena, fled through the back door as news reached him of the enemy soldiers trooping into the palace. This account may have some exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Bakhtiar Khilji defeated Lakshman Sena in a veritable blitzkrieg. The king subsequently moved to eastern Bengal with his close friends and followers.

This, then, was how the Muslim conquest of Bengal began. In the beginning, however, only a small part of what we now know as Bengal came under Muslim control. Much of eastern Bengal was then a swampy marshland and densely forested. Bakhtiar might have occupied Lakhnauti with remarkable ease, but he did not dare venture an assault on the forbidding forestland that lay to the east. Indeed, he was not alone in being thus thwarted. The sultans who came after him could not conquer eastern Bengal in the space of a century.

Was Lakhnauti Lakshman Sena’s capital, or was it Nudia? It is not very clear. The exact location of Lakhnauti or Nudia is also not clearly known. Many scholars surmise Nudia to mean ‘Nadia’. On the other hand, Lakhnauti has been identified as the contemporary name for Gaur. A site in the old city of Gaur has been identified as ‘Ballal’s palace’ by historians (Ballal Sena was Lakshman Sena’s father). The ruins found here are situated to the north of Gaur and south of Pandua. Gaur and Nadia are quite far apart from each other. The considerable distance between them has created some confusion on the question of where Lakshman Sena’s capital really was. Dinesh Chandra Sen has even tried to prove that though Gaur was Lakshman Sena’s capital, he had built a residence in Nadia, which was then an important hub of Brahmin scholars. This was where he was when Bakhtiar attacked, according to Sen, and that was why the conquest was made with such extraordinary ease. A more credible explanation has been offered by Abul Kalam Jakaria. He writes that ‘Nudia’ is actually ‘Nauda’ situated not far from Gaur, close to the modern-day Rohanpur railway station. Richard Eaton has also supported this inference.

Bakhtiar Khilji was a Turk. But not all the nobles (amirs and omrahs) and soldiers who came with him were Turks. Some of them had come from Arab lands, some from Turkistan, some from Uzbekistan, some from Iran and some from Afghanistan. In a word, they came from Central and West Asia. Habshis from north and east Africa also arrived in Bengal in the 15th century. Those who had been driven from their homelands in Central Asia by the raids of Genzhis Khan and of the non-Muslim invaders after him initially established colonies in northern India. But many of them later moved to Bengal.

These immigrants from foreign lands were all adventurers and fortune-seekers. It was to turn around their own fortunes that they travelled to faraway Bengal. They did not come to preach their faith and thereby shore up their prospects in the next world. Almost all of them had left their families behind. It was not easy in those days to make the long journey across the difficult terrain from the Middle East to Bengal, and back again. Many died on the way. Still, there were probably many who managed to return to their homelands after making enough money. But the majority got married and settled down for good, in upper India or in Bengal. It goes without saying, of course, that most of those who stayed back married local women, using either brute force or the power of money. Consequently, they themselves partly turned into Bengalis within 40 to 50 years of their arrival in the land. Two or three generations later, there would be little, apart from their religion, to distinguish them from the local population. The elite among them, however, tried to retain their privileged social position by holding on to a linguistic difference.

We have said before that these conquerors from foreign lands had not brought with them any homogeneous, monolithic culture. And even though they were Muslims by faith, there is no reason to think that they shared similar Islamic values. For instance, after Islam spread to Iran, it assimilated many local religious rites and norms. We will discuss this in greater detail in the next chapter. It is enough to mention here that religion apart, these immigrants had significant cultural differences among themselves. Of the conquerors who came to Bengal, some spoke Arabic, some spoke Farsi, and some, Turkish. Their clothes, food and architecture were also not the same. In short, one might say that it was not just Islam that came to Bengal with its Muslim rulers, but the varied cultural and civilisational traits of a vast region of the globe.

Bakhtiar Khilji ruled Bengal for just two years. According to the historian Minhaz us-Siraj, within this short span of time he was able to run his writ over a large area through the might of the sword. In order to establish his own authority, he built mosques and madrasas (schools or colleges of Islamic education) for the ulema (Muslim scholars specially versed in Islamic law and theology) and khanqahs (retreats, or lodges) for the Sufis. He also arranged for the khutba (public prayers) to include his praises during the weekly namaz at the mosque. Besides, Bakhtiar Khilji reintroduced the use of coins in Bengal after a gap of several centuries when, according to Minhaz, there were no metal coins in Bengal before Bakhtiar Khilji’s time. But it has been claimed that a coin of the time of King Sashanka has been found among the ruins of the Buddhist vihara at Mainamati. If this is true, then Khilji’s coins were not the first in Bengal. But no coins belonging to the Pala and the Sena eras have been found. It may not, therefore, be unreasonable to surmise that for a few centuries before Khilji’s arrival there were no metal coins in Bengal.

Khilji struck his gold coins not in his own name but in that of his overlord in Delhi, Sultan Muhammad Ghuri. Yet, he took care to maintain a certain difference from the Delhi coins. The message that he sent across through this was that these were coins of Gaur, and not of the sultan of Delhi. One side of his coins had inscriptions in Arabic. But the other side carried, along with Arabic inscriptions, the image of a soldier on horseback and two words in Sanskrit—‘Gaur Vijay’. The sultans who came after him had their names, titles and dates inscribed on their coins in Arabic. It might appear on the face of it that Khilji chose to have ‘Gaur Vijay’ inscribed in Sanskrit because his were the first coins in Bengal after several centuries and the local population was not familiar with Arabic. His real intention, however, was to prove his own supremacy, both to the sultan in Delhi, and in Bengal.

In the seven years after Khilji, four rulers sat on the throne of Gaur. Even in this short span of time they all managed to introduce coins either in their own names or in that of the sultan of Delhi. Evidently, they were more interested in establishing their own supremacy than in restoring peace in the land. It also gives a hint of the kind of intense competition for power that was then under way within the ruling class. They had neither the time nor the opportunity to introduce reforms in the political establishment or the revenue system. However, Naseeruddin Mahmud was able to introduce a degree of stability after seizing the throne in 1213. He ruled for 14 years. No other sultan in 13th century Bengal was able to rule for that long. It can, perhaps, be assumed that it was he who, for the first time, tried to evolve a system of administration in close coordination with the local people. And he might even have been able to work out some kind of administrative structure. Moreover, though even in the 1st century of Muslim rule in Bengal the sultans tried every now and then to rule independently, they were all more or less under the sway of Delhi. They ruled in the name of the sultan of Delhi. Still, they seldom failed to seize upon moments of strife or weakness in Delhi to declare themselves as independent sultans.

Whether the sultans ruled independently, or with some degree of autonomy, the history of the 1st century of Muslim rule in Bengal is one of ruling with the sword. The sultans, their military officers and their nobles (the amirs and the omrahs) did not hesitate to shed blood or to desecrate places of worship in their efforts to subdue the local population. The most remarkable and iconic example of this tendency was Zafar Khan at the end of the century. He was said to be a pir (Sufi teacher and guide). Going by the size of his army of followers and soldiers, however, it would be more apt to describe him as a warrior pir. Besides, he helped the late 13th century ruler Ruknuddin Kaikaus to expand his sultanate. He might even have been a minor general under the sultan. He built a huge mosque at Tribeni. This mosque was a particularly noteworthy example of the use of the sword in the preaching of faith. Many of the stone slabs used in this mosque, built in 1298, have images of Hindu gods and goddesses carved on one side. In a stone inscription in the mosque, Zafar Khan boasts about how he destroyed kaffirs (infidels) with his sword. His mazar (mausoleum) was built close by, in 1313. This mazar was also constructed with stones that had been earlier used in temples of the kaffirs. Yet, the mosque and the mazar are not just symbols of the slaughter and subjugation of kaffirs. They are also beautiful examples of Indo-Turkish architecture. The minar (tower) that was built around the same time at the mosque in Choto Pandua in Hooghly district can also be recognised as Turkish architecture.

It is reasonable to ask in what ways the new rulers asserted their authority over the local population in the 1st century of Muslim rule. Is it possible to ceaselessly rule by the sword for years on end? Is it possible year after year to fill the treasury by plundering the wealth of petty kings and landlords? Perhaps not. It is more likely that the new rulers had to put in place some kind of an administrative system to govern and rule, and to do this they had to take the help of the local population. The new ruling elite did not know the local language. From the start, therefore, they were forced to depend on local collaborators to rule the land. It was the local kings and landlords who actually ruled in their name. In this way, before long there rose from among the local population an intermediate section of middlemen and brokers.

Zafar Khan Gazhi’s Mosque. Photo courtesy: Biswarup Ganguly (commons.wikimedia.org)

The exchanges that took place between the new rulers and this intermediate section, as well as the population at large, led, it seems within the first two or three centuries, to considerable co-mingling between the local language and culture and the language and culture brought by the Muslim immigrants. In particular, Arabic as the language of religious discourse, and initially Turkish and then Farsi as the language of administration slowly made their influence felt in the local language and literature. The English influence on Bengalis in the 18th and 19th centuries provides an inkling of the kind of impact that the newcomers must have made. If the 19th century produced an Anglicised Bengali society, then the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries produced a ‘Turkish-Bengali’ society. And just as the Anglicised Bengalis of the 19th century embraced foreign influences in their dress, language and in some food habits, it is reasonable to suppose that the Turkish-influenced Bengalis of earlier centuries had done the same. Many writers have left accounts of what the Anglicised Bengali society of the 19th century was like. Not much is known of the Turkish-Bengali society. But the descriptions that are available of Jagai and Madhai (two dissolute and meat-eating brothers redeemed by Chaitanyadev’s disciples) of the early 16th century suggest that they belonged to this Turkish-Bengali section influenced by the Islamic world. The Jagais and the Madhais were of course different from the Anglicised Bengalis of the British colonial era, but the difference was quantitative rather than qualitative. Besides, the intermingling left its mark, more or less, on religion, architecture and various other aspects of life.

There is no specific information available about the section of people whose help Muslim rulers were constrained to seek in order to build up an administrative structure and a revenue system. It, is, however, possible to make inferences. Many of those who had been enthusiastic participants in the Brahmanic revival under the Sena rulers had followed Lakshman Sena into exile. Many of the king’s warriors and aides would have also followed him. But there must have been a fair sprinkling of educated people among those who stayed back in and around the capital. Especially among the Brahmins and the Kayasthas, the two most dominant castes. They were the ones who presumably acted as the link between the rulers and the ruled in the initial years. It will not be illogical to assume that it was this section that was in the beginning most influenced by Muslim culture.

Almost all evidence of the kind of exchanges that took place between the cultures of the Middle East and Bengal in the first two centuries of Muslim rule, and of exactly when and how much the local culture was consequently influenced, is lost. But some pointers can be found in the architecture and the literature of the times. There are even indications of how the local culture influenced the rulers. Bricks, rather than stone, had to be used for the mosques, mazars and dargahs built by the rulers during this period. They had to come to terms with the fact that it was hard to come by stones in Bengal, even with the might of the sword to back them. Besides, they had themselves introduced the widespread use of lime and mortar to hold the bricks together. Many scholars say that the use of lime and mortar in construction was not known in Bengal before the time of the Muslim sultans. It is difficult to gauge how far this claim is justified. But even if the use of lime and mortar was not unprecedented, the style of domes, towers and arches introduced by the Muslim rulers was undoubtedly novel in Bengal. Their towers and domes were also quite distinct from those built in and around Delhi, partly because of differences in the ingredients used. Besides, though the Muslims gave their domes, towers and arches to Bengal, they in turn borrowed considerably from native architectural styles. The most remarkable of these was the use of terracotta. We will discuss this in the chapter ‘Architecture, Art and Craft’.

The Era of Independent Sultans in Bengal

In the 14th century, the links between the local culture and the imported one grew relatively closer. One reason was that as the second half of this century began, the sultans of Bengal ceased to recognise the authority of their former overlords in Delhi and turned into independent rulers for good. After coming to power in 1342, Ilyas Shah gradually occupied, if not the entire swathe of land in eastern India between Assam and Bihar/Odisha, an extensive area in it. Some of these territories were part of the Tughlaq empire. It was easy for Ilyas Shah to establish his sway over them because they were situated far away from the imperial capital in Delhi. But these feats also bear testimony to his boldness, determination and ambition. Finally, in 1353, Sultan Firoze Shah Tughlaq of Delhi attacked Bengal with a huge force in an attempt to put a leash on Ilyas’s increasing power. But Ilyas Shah was a shrewd military strategist. He did not put up any resistance at all and allowed Firoze Shah to advance deep into his territory. He himself retreated into the inaccessible Ekdala Fort away from the capital. Firoze sat on a prolonged siege outside the fort but could not occupy it. Eventually there was a pitched battle, but though Ilyas Shah suffered heavy losses, Firoze Shah was unable to win. Some historians claim that some two hundred thousand soldiers died in this battle. In the end, Firoze Shah decamped from Bengal in view of the impending monsoon. The two adversaries subsequently made truce, and Firoze Shah recognised Ilyas as an independent sultan. In his fight against the force from Delhi, Ilyas Shah was helped by local landlords and their private armies. These landlords were in those days known as ‘Ray’, meaning ‘raja’ or king. After repulsing the attack from Delhi, Ilyas Shah moved his capital from Lakhnauti to Pandua, some 20 miles to the north.

2.2 Areas that Ilyas Shah brought under his rule.

Partly because he had conquered eastern Bengal, and partly because he accepted Bengal as the land to which he belonged, Ilyas Shah proclaimed himself as ‘Shah Bangalian’, or the ‘king of the Bengalis’. The limits of his kingdom, though, were not confined to Bengal. He had extended them to include stray fragments of Bihar and Assam. Among the Muslim-ruled territories in India thus far, his was the dominion with the most extensive borders. It does not look as if any Hindu or Buddhist ruler before him had been able to bring such a large stretch of land under a single administration either. Ilyas Shah was also able to establish peace and order in his territories.

Despite the truce of 1353, Firoze Shah Tughlaq never really gave up his intention to bring Bengal back under Delhi’s domination. Six years later, in 1359, he attacked Bengal for the second time. By that time Ilyas Shah was dead and his son Sikander Shah was the sultan. Sikander was his father’s son: he never accepted the domination of Delhi and, like his father, was able to repulse Tughlaq’s army. After that, he ruled for 32 years, almost without any challenge to his authority. No other sultan in Bengal was able to rule for quite so long.

Thereafter, the period of independent rule