Should we make a Petition to change the Devanagari script of Bangla!?

[notsuperstitious]

Joe Sir, why British didn't promote Urdu in Bengal unlike making Urdu as the provincial language of Punjab after securing the Hindi-Urdu divide in UP.

Probably because the idea was to divide, whereas such a move would have backfired and united instead?

 

[INDIC]

@INDIC

I'm not very sure why they should have promoted Urdu in Bengal at all. What would be the purpose? when they had a perfectly good language already? And the relevant dates were exactly a century apart: don't forget we are looking at the period between 1757 to 1857. When would they have had time to do all this language promotion?

In every province British promoted the local language, when it came to Punjab, they brought an official language from outside and neglected the Punjabi language even though Punjabi had very rich medieval literature of Baba Farid, Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah. I also read that in many languages of British India like Sindhi or Malayalam languages both Arabic and native Indian scripts were used but everywhere they made a common standard with a single writing system only in case of UP-Bihar the language got divided into Hindi-Urdu after they tried to enforce Arabic script on the Hindu majority of UP-Bihar in 1837 leading to widespread unacceptance and decades of court case to get Hindi in Devanagari script to be recognized. After the Hindi-Urdu division, Urdu emerged as some symbol of Muslim identity and readily accepted as the provincial language of Punjab. Since, Urdu never penetrated in Bengal, the language conflict came into wide open between East and West Pakistan.

Probably because the idea was to divide, whereas such a move would have backfired and united instead?

I believe Bengal was in their 'neglect list' of divide and rule until the partition of Bengal in 1905, British seemed mainly focused towards UP and North-West.

 

[Joe Shearer]

In every province British promoted the local language, when it came to Punjab, they brought an official language from outside and neglected the Punjabi language even though Punjabi had very rich medieval literature of Baba Farid, Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah. I also read that in many languages of British India like Sindhi or Malayalam languages both Arabic and native Indian scripts were used but everywhere they made a common standard with a single writing system only in case of UP-Bihar the language got divided into Hindi-Urdu after they tried to enforce Arabic script on the Hindu majority of UP-Bihar in 1837 leading to widespread unacceptance and decades of court case to get Hindi in Devanagari script to be recognized. After the Hindi-Urdu division, Urdu emerged as some symbol of Muslim identity and readily accepted as the provincial language of Punjab. Since, Urdu never penetrated in Bengal, the language conflict came into wide open between East and West Pakistan.



I believe Bengal was in their 'neglect list' of divide and rule until the partition of Bengal in 1905, British seemed mainly focused towards UP and North-West.

Actually, the honest answer, @INDIC, would be that I don't know. I need to read about language politics in these regions and get back to you.

 

[kalu_miah]

Hang on for a moment.

Both you and my Indian friends have the impression that this was some kind of exposure of your position.

Please read my repeated statement. I have cited, again and again, at one stage, before every post, your own post where you said that I had a wrong impression. There was a question, had you read the book, and there was a statement, that it would appall a chauvinist.

Having read the book - and thank you very kindly for introducing me to Eaton - I think that he has made a dramatic point: that the phenomenon of an overwhelmingly Muslim population in this isolated part of the world is due to a very special kind of agrarian expansion that occurred here, very late in the day, not very early. He has taken into account the four conventional reasons for this population,

1. Migration
2. Forcible conversion
3. Patronage
4. Social liberation

and has carefully, systematically dissected each of them, and disproved them. What is left is only the clear dating of the expansion of the Muslim population, which he assigns to as late as the Mughal period, an astounding assertion, contrary to everything that we had held earlier - certainly contrary to what I believed before reading this wholly persuasive book.

Since you have read the book, the question arises - what exactly is it that I seek to convey to you?

First, that it is a refutation of various chauvinist views that we have read here. Ironically, it shatters the illusions of both Muslim chauvinists, that the population was due to mass migration, that the Muslims of Bengal are really migrants who immigrated en masse, and the Hindu chauvinists, who claim variously that this population came into being due to the threat of violence, or that they are all former Hindus and Buddhists who converted due to either, slightingly, a desire to get out of the oppressed status as non-Muslims that they occupied, or, on the lines of the Ambedkar/Dalit argument, that they sought Social Liberation (my view till now).

All of us who advocated this, that or the other are now sitting here with egg on our faces, some of us, who have just read the book, with a happy smile under the yolk.

Second, that it is no longer a question of a long-standing composite Muslim Bengali culture, a view that was put forward so earnestly and sincerely by various sections, the @asad71 and @khair_ctg view among others, if I understood them correctly. Far from being long-standing, this was as late as the 16th century, perhaps later, and is after the Mughal conquest of Bengal. It is after the shift eastwards of the main channel of the Ganga eastwards, and the consequent opening up of vast forest areas for exploitation and conversion to agricultural, and the directly linked sudden expansion of the population under conditions of greater security and prosperity.

Third, that one of us, and I shall not name the individual, lands up with, not egg, but some other yellow and in that particular case vile-smelling substance on the face. Eaton proves decisively, and that is the reason for my extensive citations, that there was nothing like a composite Bengalo-Persian cultural composite which was built up in the centuries that passed between Bakhtiyar Khalji and the partitions of Bengal. Every citation, every paragraph of his book makes it very clear that it was the original culture and language that prevailed over the invaders, and that what remained, before the Mughal intervention, was a largely traditional and native tradition of kingship and rule, overlaid by the necessities of Islamic rule, the striking of coins and reading of the khutba, the legal system, in some aspects, and the influences at the very top, at the level of the Sultan himself, other than during the interregnum, if I may call it that, of Ganesh and his son. The Husain Shahis apparently were content to rule, and to allow some aspects of the earlier traditions of kingship to return, rather than stick to the straight and narrow path recommended by the Sufi savants.

Fourth, I believe that there are chauvinists here, of both sides, and I am wholly ready to believe, based on your remarks in your latest post, that you are not one of them. I also agree with you that the work is brilliant, nothing short of that, and has entirely converted me to this point of view. Your assertion that other south Asian histories - you mention Hindu, but I beg to draw your attention to this being a general malaise, not leaving out the Christians (Europeans) or Muslims (Indian, Persian, Turkish, Arabic) - were either biased, or plain incompetent or simply lacked any sense of context about how events unfolded, and about the intimate connection at some points of time between Central Asia and Bengal, are perfectly valid.

Incidentally, I read those parts with a sense of disbelief and a dawning enlightenment, as having thrown clear and lucid light on some aspects that were simply not making sense without this connection having existed.

If these views are yours, you are clearly an unbiased observer and analyst, perhaps even an historian by education, and also clearly not a chauvinist, at least not here , not now. I have no reason to doubt your statement that you hold these views.

I sincerely hope that this will set to rest the concept that what is being advocated in this thread is justified by tradition and past practice.

What remains is the path that the people of Bangladesh set for themselves in future, as a sovereign, independent nation. If they set themselves to reminding themselves of their membership of the Islamic community by changing the script in which Bengali is written, it is their sovereign desire, and good luck to them. There is nothing that anyone else can or should say. That, however, will be decided outside this forum. If such a debate arises, I, for one, shall watch it from the galleries with the keenest academic interest and no personal concern or emotional involvement, as being, ultimately, none of my business.

I hope that this will make my own position clear, and also the reason for such extensive citation. Far from my correcting gaps in your knowledge, this is an acknowledgement that gaps in my own knowledge have been corrected. However, it also puts to rest the canard that Bengalo-Persian culture prevailed in the centuries past. Instead, it makes it clear that it was at best restricted to the very short Mughal rule over Bengal, and throws new light on the Bengal Renaissance, correcting the impression that it was an entirely innovative, Eurocentric breakthrough and also the impression that it was a Bengali Hindu revenge on the Muslim elite, taken under cover of British patronage.



I think Eaton has put this argument in its place. There is no need to spend time uselessly arguing over this obvious fallacy or to indulge in this sort of fantasising:



Poppycock.

I am glad you liked the book and the presented thesis of Agrarian expansion in the book. I will get back with a detailed reply to this post later.

 

[kalu_miah]

@kalu_miah

Although Eaton's thesis is wholly convincing in the case of east Bengal, there is still a disturbing quiggle in one's mind about the universality of his explanation. He explains the creation of an unexpectedly large Muslim population isolated from other major centres of Muslim population through the expanding agricultural frontier and its demographic consequences. Presumably, there are similar reasons to explain the existence of two other pockets widely separated from other Muslim populations, the Malays of the peninsula and the Indonesians. Was there such a shifting of the agricultural frontier in those countries as well? If not, what explains the wholesale conversion of the population in those places? Brute force is quite clearly ruled out.

Spread of Islam in Southeast Asia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760

"Finally, from a world history perspective, the Bengali experience with religious growth was perhaps not at all unique. There is at least one other case—western Java—in which Islam grew in tandem with deforestation, agrarian expansion, and the establishment of small mosques on lands granted by the state.[19] A better-known parallel is found in the history of Christianity in northern Europe. From the sixth century and especially between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries (“l’âge des grands défrichements,” according to French writers), monastic orders like the Benedictines and the Cistercians actively planted monasteries in wooded regions, where they took the lead in clearing forests, converting unbelievers, and extending agriculture. Especially noteworthy are the religious aspects of this process: the desacralization of the forest, the Christianization of native peoples, and the sanctification of pioneering monks.[20] “As they pushed into the woodlands and felled the trees,” writes Richard Koebner, monks “helped to dispel that religious awe which the Germans had to overcome before they would attack thick forest. The attraction of the Church’s miraculous powers was transferred to the holy men in the woods, and brought the laity to settle near them.”[21] Although the early movement’s austere pioneers were succeeded by rich landlords who managed wealthy estates, we should not ignore the civilization-building role that monastic establishments had earlier played in the forests of northern Europe.

Viewed historically, religious systems are created, cultural artifacts, and not timeless structures lying beyond human societies. As such they are continuously reinterpreted and readapted to particular sociocultural environments. Yet even while this happens, religious traditions transform those environments in creative ways. Herein lies, perhaps, the secret of the successful world religions, for when they are not flexible or adaptable, they tend to ossify into hollow shells, and survive only in museums or forgotten texts. Christianity would never have flourished—and perhaps not even have survived—had it not absorbed a great part of both the imperial culture and the Germanic popular culture of the late Roman Empire.[22]

This is no less true of Islam and the Bengal frontier. In the “success stories” of world religions, and the story of Islam in Bengal is among these, the norms of religion and the realities of local sociocultural systems ultimately accommodate one another. Although theorists, theologians, or reformers may resist this point, it seems nonetheless to be intuitively grasped by common folk. A famous proverb, known throughout Bengal and northern India and uttered usually with a smile, implicitly links social status with Islamically legitimated titles:

The first year I was a Shaikh, the second year a Khan;

This year if the price of grain is low I’ll become a Saiyid.[23]

What made Islam in Bengal not only historically successful but a continuing vital social reality has been its capacity to adapt to the land and the culture of its people, even while transforming both."

 

[Joe Shearer]

What a stunning analysis! It actually explains the thin fringe of Hindu land-owners and the vast bulk of Muslim peasants in historical and economic terms.

As a descendant on my mother's side of Baidyas from Barisal, this resonates very strongly.

This passage hints at the origins of the distinctive land tenure system that emerged in Mughal East Bengal. In order to maintain their claims to social dominance in a region chronically short of resident Brahmans, high-caste Hindus already established in the southern delta encouraged and probably financed the settlement of other high-caste zamīndārs in the region.[88] But such Hindus predominated only at the upper reaches of the tenure chain, for, as Jack noted, social taboos prevented them from undertaking cultivation themselves. On the other hand, those same classes—typically Brahman or Baidya traders and moneylenders—had accumulated sufficient capital to advance loans to sublessees; and these, in turn, hired sublessees below them, and so on, until one reached the mass of cultivators at the bottom of the tenure chain. Whether recruited from amongst indigenous peoples or brought in from the outside, these latter worked as ordinary cultivators on lands newly reclaimed from the jungle.

Spread of Islam in Southeast Asia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760

"Finally, from a world history perspective, the Bengali experience with religious growth was perhaps not at all unique. There is at least one other case—western Java—in which Islam grew in tandem with deforestation, agrarian expansion, and the establishment of small mosques on lands granted by the state.[19] A better-known parallel is found in the history of Christianity in northern Europe. From the sixth century and especially between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries (“l’âge des grands défrichements,” according to French writers), monastic orders like the Benedictines and the Cistercians actively planted monasteries in wooded regions, where they took the lead in clearing forests, converting unbelievers, and extending agriculture. Especially noteworthy are the religious aspects of this process: the desacralization of the forest, the Christianization of native peoples, and the sanctification of pioneering monks.[20] “As they pushed into the woodlands and felled the trees,” writes Richard Koebner, monks “helped to dispel that religious awe which the Germans had to overcome before they would attack thick forest. The attraction of the Church’s miraculous powers was transferred to the holy men in the woods, and brought the laity to settle near them.”[21] Although the early movement’s austere pioneers were succeeded by rich landlords who managed wealthy estates, we should not ignore the civilization-building role that monastic establishments had earlier played in the forests of northern Europe.

Viewed historically, religious systems are created, cultural artifacts, and not timeless structures lying beyond human societies. As such they are continuously reinterpreted and readapted to particular sociocultural environments. Yet even while this happens, religious traditions transform those environments in creative ways. Herein lies, perhaps, the secret of the successful world religions, for when they are not flexible or adaptable, they tend to ossify into hollow shells, and survive only in museums or forgotten texts. Christianity would never have flourished—and perhaps not even have survived—had it not absorbed a great part of both the imperial culture and the Germanic popular culture of the late Roman Empire.[22]

This is no less true of Islam and the Bengal frontier. In the “success stories” of world religions, and the story of Islam in Bengal is among these, the norms of religion and the realities of local sociocultural systems ultimately accommodate one another. Although theorists, theologians, or reformers may resist this point, it seems nonetheless to be intuitively grasped by common folk. A famous proverb, known throughout Bengal and northern India and uttered usually with a smile, implicitly links social status with Islamically legitimated titles:

The first year I was a Shaikh, the second year a Khan;

This year if the price of grain is low I’ll become a Saiyid.[23]

What made Islam in Bengal not only historically successful but a continuing vital social reality has been its capacity to adapt to the land and the culture of its people, even while transforming both."

I had read this and wasn't sure about the robustness of the analysis. It isn't as gripping, as convincing as his analysis of Bengal. Actually, as far as his remarks about Europe are concerned, I am rather more familiar with that, being better acquainted with European history than Asian (other than Indian).

But point well made and taken.

 

[Vinod2070]

A better idea would be for you to just migrate to a country where people use those scripts....and if you don't have the money we have plenty of camps in Dhaka where people who use those scripts live....make yourself comfortable and go live there and pray to a god of your preference so that magical fairies from heaven come down to change my script.....do not waste cyberspace with your horse shit....you give my people a bad name!


Madrasah education.....I'm quite surprised they actually know the name of a script other than farsi and arabic!

That should be simple enough!

Why pollute an Indo Aryan language based on Sanskrit? Why not start speaking the original language they are so obsessed about?

Or better still (as you recommend) get the hell back to the desert!

 

[kalu_miah]

@Joe Shearer you may find this page interesting and its relevant to the topic of this thread as well:
(something strange going on after the mention of the word amulet)

The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760

Literacy and Islamization
Although the growth of Islam in Bengal witnessed no neat or uniform progression from inclusion to identification to displacement, one does see, at least in the eastern delta, a general drive toward the eventual displacement of local divinities. In part, one can explain this in terms of Bengal’s integration, since the late sixteenth century, into a pan-Indian, and indeed, a global civilization. Akbar’s 1574 conquest of the northwestern delta established a pattern by which the whole delta would be politically and economically integrated with North India. What was unique about the east, however, was that prior to the late sixteenth century, its hinterland had remained relatively undeveloped and isolated as compared with the west; hence the expansion of Mughal power there was accompanied by the establishment of new agrarian communities and not simply the integration of old ones. Composed partly of outsiders—emigrants from West Bengal or even North India—and partly of newly peasantized indigenous communities of former fishermen or shifting cultivators, these communities typically coalesced around the many rural mosques, shrines, or Qur’an schools built by enterprising pioneers who had contracted with the government to transform tracts of virgin jungle into fields of cultivated paddy.

It was mainly in the east, moreover, that political incorporation was accompanied by the intrusion and eventual primacy of Islamic superhuman agencies in local cosmologies. Contributing to this was the very nature of Islamic religious authority, which does not flow from priests, magicians, or other mortal agents, but from a medium that is ultimately immortal and unchallengeable—written scripture. The connection between literacy and divine power in Islam is perfectly explicit.[73] Moreover, well before their rise to prominence in Bengal, Muslims had already constructed a great world civilization around the Qur’an and the vast corpus of literature making up Islamic Law. It is therefore not coincidental that Muslims have described theirs as the “religion of the Book.”

It is true, of course, that the Hindu tradition is also scripturally based. As living repositories of Vedic learning, or at least of traditions that derive legitimacy from that learning, Brahmans “represent” scriptural authority in a way roughly analogous to the way Muslim men of piety mediate, and thus “represent,” the Qur’an. By the time of the Turkish conquest, a scripturally based religious culture under Brahman leadership had already become well entrenched in the dense and socially stratified society of the western delta. In this context, the intrusion of another scripturally defined religious culture, Islam, failed to have a significant impact. But the coherence of the Brahmanic socioreligious order progressively diminished as one moved from west to east across the delta, rendering the preliterate masses of the east without an authority structure sufficient to withstand that of Islam. Among these peoples the rustic shrines, mosques, and Qur’an schools that we have been examining introduced a type of religious authority that was fundamentally new and of greater power relative to what had been there previously. “In non-literate societies,” writes J. D.Y. Peel, a scholar of religious change in modern West Africa,

the past is perceived as entirely servant of the needs of the present, things are forgotten and myth is constructed to justify contemporary arrangements; there are no dictionary definitions of words.…In religion there is no sense of impersonal or universal orthodoxy of doctrine; legitimate belief is as a particular priest or elder expounds it. But where the essence of religion is the Word of God, where all arguments are resolved by an appeal to an unchangeable written authority, where those who formulate new beliefs at a time of crisis commit themselves by writing and publishing pamphlets…religion acquires a rigid basis. “Structural amnesia” is hardly possible; what was thought in the past commits men to particular courses of action in the present; religion comes to be thought of as a system of rules, emanating from an absolute and universal God, which are quite external to the thinker, and to which he must conform and bend himself, if he would be saved.[74]

In eastern Bengal, where Brahmans were thinly scattered, the analog to Peel’s “particular priest or elder” was typically a local ritualist who was neither literate nor a Brahman. True, the mosque builders, rural mullās, or charismatic pīrs who fanned out over the eastern plains may also have been illiterate; moreover, the basis of their authority, like that of indigenous non-Muslim ritualists, was often charismatic in nature. But what is important is that these same men patronized Qur’an readers and “readers offātiḥa,” who, even if themselves only semi-literate in Arabic, were seen as representing the authority of the written word as opposed to the ad hoc, localized, and transient authority of indigenous ritualists.[75] Therefore, with the introduction of Qur’an readers, Qur’an schools, and “readers of fātiḥa” into the delta, the relatively fluid and expansive cosmology of pre-Muslim eastern Bengal began to resolve into one favoring the primacy of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad. As Peel puts it, religion began to acquire “a rigid basis.”

Further facilitating the growth of this “religion of the Book” in Bengal was the diffusion of paper and of papermaking technology. Introduced from Central Asia into North India in the thirteenth century by Persianized Turks, by the fifteenth century the technology of paper production had found its way into Bengal, where it eventually replaced the palm leaf.[76] Already in 1432, the Chinese visitor Ma Huan remarked that the Bengalis’ “paper is white; it is made out of the bark of a tree, and is as smooth and glossy as deer’s skin.”[77] And by the close of the sixteenth century the poet Mukundaram noted the presence of whole communities of Muslim papermakers (kāgajī) in Bengali cities.[78]The revolutionary impact that the technology of literacy made on premodern Bengali society is suggested in the ordinary Bengali words for paper (kāgaj) and pen (kalam), both of which are corrupted loan words from Perso-Arabic. It is also significant that on Bengal’s expanding agrarian frontier, the introduction of papermaking technology coincided with the rise of a Muslim religious gentry whose authority structure was ultimately based on the written word—scripture. While it would be the crudest technological determinism to say that the diffusion of paper production simply caused the growth of Islam in Bengal or elsewhere, it is certainly true that this more efficient technology of knowledge led to more books, which in turn promoted a greater familiarity with at least the idea of literacy, and that this greater familiarity led, in turn, to the association of the written word with religious authority.

Serving to check the growth of the “religion of the Book,” however, was the fact that the book in question, the Qur’an, was written in a language unknown to the masses of Bengali society. Moreover, since the Qur’an had been revealed in Arabic, in Bengal as elsewhere fear of tampering with the word of God inhibited its outright translation. As we have seen, Bengali Muslims were extremely reluctant to translate even Islamic popular lore into Bengali. Of course, they could have done what many other non-Arab Muslims did—that is, retain their own language for written discourse but render it in the Arabic script, as happened in Iran (modern Persian) and North India (Urdu). The transliteration of any language into Arabic script not only facilitates the assimilation of Arabic vocabulary but fosters a psychological bond between non-Arab and Arab Muslims. In the seventeenth century, in fact, attempts were made to do the same for Bengali. The Dhaka Museum has a manuscript work composed in 1645 entitled Maqtul Husain—a tract treating the death of Husain at Karbala—written in Bengali but using the Arabic, and not the Bengali, script.[79] Although subsequent writers made similar such literary attempts,[80] it is significant that the effort never took hold, with the result that Bengali Muslims remain today the world’s largest body of Muslims who, despite Islamization, have retained both their language and their script.[81]

Since Islamic scripture was neither translated nor transliterated in premodern Bengal, it not surprisingly first entered mass culture in a magical, as opposed to liturgical, context. In Ksemananda’s Manasā-Maṅgala, a work composed in the mid seventeenth century, we hear that in the house of one of the poem’s Hindu figures (Laksmindhara, son of Chand), a copy of the Qur’an was kept along with other charms for the purpose of warding off evil influence.[82] From the remarks of Vijaya Gupta, a poet of East Bengal’s Barisal region, who wrote in 1494,[83] we find an even earlier reference to the same use of Muslim scripture. In this instance, the written word appeared not in a Hindu household but in the hands of a mullā. A group of seven weavers, evidently Muslims, since they resided in “Husainhati,” were bitten by snakes unleashed by the goddess Manasa and went to the court of the qāẓī seeking help. Wrote the poet:

There was a teacher of the Qāḍī named Khālās…who always engaged himself in the study of the Qur’an and other religious books.…He said, if you ask me, I say, why are you afraid of demons [bhūt], when you have got the religious books. Write (extracts) from the book and hang it down the neck. If then also the demons (implying snakes) bite, I shall be held responsible. The Qāḍī accepted what the Mullā said and all present took amulet from him (the Mullā).[84]

Here we see a Muslim ritualist mediating on the people’s behalf with a class of ubiquitous spirits, bhūt, that pervaded (and still pervades) the folk Bengali cosmology.[85]Moreover, the mullā clearly used the scripture in a magical and not a liturgical context, for it was not by reading the holy book that he dealt with evil spirits but by having his clients wear written extracts from it around their necks—a usage that enjoyed the endorsement of the state-appointed Muslim judge, or qāẓī.[86] In modern times, too, one finds ritualists employing the magical power of the Qur’an for healing purposes in precisely the manner that mullās had done three centuries earlier. In 1898 an ojhā, a local shamanlike ritualist, was observed in a village in Sylhet District using Qur’anic passages in his treatment of persons possessed by bhūts.[87] And in recent years ojhās among the non-Muslim Chakma tribesmen of the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been integrating Muslim scripture and Islamic superhuman agencies into their healing rituals, indicating the continued penetration of Islamic religious culture beyond the delta and into the adjacent mountains.[88]

On the other hand, European observers noted that Bengali mullās also used the Qur’an in purely liturgical, as opposed to magical, contexts. In 1833 Francis Buchanan observed that in rural Dinajpur, mullās “read, or repeat prayers or passages of the Koran at marriages, funerals, circumcisions, and sacrifices, for no Muslim will eat meat or fowl, over which prayers have not been repeated, before it has been killed.…According to the Kazis, many of these Mollas cannot read, and these only look at the book, while they repeat the passages.”[89] Although the mullās observed by Buchanan were themselves unable to read, they were nonetheless understood by their village clients to be tapping into a transcendent source of power, the written word, fundamentally greater and more permanent than those known to local ritualists. In the same way, it was reported in 1898 that Muslim villagers in Sylhet “employ Mullahs to read Koran Shariff and allow the merit thereof to be credited to the forefathers”[90]—an apparent reference to the same kind of fātiḥa rituals that sanads of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had authorized for rural mosques and shrines.

All of this points to a progressive expansion in the countryside of the culture of literacy—that is, a tendency to confer authority on written religious texts and on persons associated with them (whether or not they could read those texts). This expanding culture of literacy naturally facilitated the growth of the cult of those superhuman agencies with which that culture was most clearly identified. In short, as the idea of “the book-as-authority” grew among ever-widening circles of East Bengal’s rural society—a development clearly traceable from the sixteenth century—so too did the “religion of the Book,” with its emphasis on the cosmological supremacy of Allah.​

 

[Joe Shearer]

There are obviously two threads going on in parallel here. Thank Heavens for that.

 

[kalu_miah]

What a stunning analysis! It actually explains the thin fringe of Hindu land-owners and the vast bulk of Muslim peasants in historical and economic terms.

As a descendant on my mother's side of Baidyas from Barisal, this resonates very strongly.

I had read this and wasn't sure about the robustness of the analysis. It isn't as gripping, as convincing as his analysis of Bengal. Actually, as far as his remarks about Europe are concerned, I am rather more familiar with that, being better acquainted with European history than Asian (other than Indian).

But point well made and taken.

Eaton does mention Western Java where Islam spread with Agrarian expansion similar to Bengal, I have highlighted it in bold in post #456 of this page.

 

[Joe Shearer]

@Joe Shearer you may find this page interesting and its relevant to the topic of this thread as well:
(something strange going on after the mention of the word amulet)

The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760

Literacy and Islamization
Although the growth of Islam in Bengal witnessed no neat or uniform progression from inclusion to identification to displacement, one does see, at least in the eastern delta, a general drive toward the eventual displacement of local divinities. In part, one can explain this in terms of Bengal’s integration, since the late sixteenth century, into a pan-Indian, and indeed, a global civilization. Akbar’s 1574 conquest of the northwestern delta established a pattern by which the whole delta would be politically and economically integrated with North India. What was unique about the east, however, was that prior to the late sixteenth century, its hinterland had remained relatively undeveloped and isolated as compared with the west; hence the expansion of Mughal power there was accompanied by the establishment of new agrarian communities and not simply the integration of old ones. Composed partly of outsiders—emigrants from West Bengal or even North India—and partly of newly peasantized indigenous communities of former fishermen or shifting cultivators, these communities typically coalesced around the many rural mosques, shrines, or Qur’an schools built by enterprising pioneers who had contracted with the government to transform tracts of virgin jungle into fields of cultivated paddy.

It was mainly in the east, moreover, that political incorporation was accompanied by the intrusion and eventual primacy of Islamic superhuman agencies in local cosmologies. Contributing to this was the very nature of Islamic religious authority, which does not flow from priests, magicians, or other mortal agents, but from a medium that is ultimately immortal and unchallengeable—written scripture. The connection between literacy and divine power in Islam is perfectly explicit.[73] Moreover, well before their rise to prominence in Bengal, Muslims had already constructed a great world civilization around the Qur’an and the vast corpus of literature making up Islamic Law. It is therefore not coincidental that Muslims have described theirs as the “religion of the Book.”

It is true, of course, that the Hindu tradition is also scripturally based. As living repositories of Vedic learning, or at least of traditions that derive legitimacy from that learning, Brahmans “represent” scriptural authority in a way roughly analogous to the way Muslim men of piety mediate, and thus “represent,” the Qur’an. By the time of the Turkish conquest, a scripturally based religious culture under Brahman leadership had already become well entrenched in the dense and socially stratified society of the western delta. In this context, the intrusion of another scripturally defined religious culture, Islam, failed to have a significant impact. But the coherence of the Brahmanic socioreligious order progressively diminished as one moved from west to east across the delta, rendering the preliterate masses of the east without an authority structure sufficient to withstand that of Islam. Among these peoples the rustic shrines, mosques, and Qur’an schools that we have been examining introduced a type of religious authority that was fundamentally new and of greater power relative to what had been there previously. “In non-literate societies,” writes J. D.Y. Peel, a scholar of religious change in modern West Africa,

the past is perceived as entirely servant of the needs of the present, things are forgotten and myth is constructed to justify contemporary arrangements; there are no dictionary definitions of words.…In religion there is no sense of impersonal or universal orthodoxy of doctrine; legitimate belief is as a particular priest or elder expounds it. But where the essence of religion is the Word of God, where all arguments are resolved by an appeal to an unchangeable written authority, where those who formulate new beliefs at a time of crisis commit themselves by writing and publishing pamphlets…religion acquires a rigid basis. “Structural amnesia” is hardly possible; what was thought in the past commits men to particular courses of action in the present; religion comes to be thought of as a system of rules, emanating from an absolute and universal God, which are quite external to the thinker, and to which he must conform and bend himself, if he would be saved.[74]

In eastern Bengal, where Brahmans were thinly scattered, the analog to Peel’s “particular priest or elder” was typically a local ritualist who was neither literate nor a Brahman. True, the mosque builders, rural mullās, or charismatic pīrs who fanned out over the eastern plains may also have been illiterate; moreover, the basis of their authority, like that of indigenous non-Muslim ritualists, was often charismatic in nature. But what is important is that these same men patronized Qur’an readers and “readers offātiḥa,” who, even if themselves only semi-literate in Arabic, were seen as representing the authority of the written word as opposed to the ad hoc, localized, and transient authority of indigenous ritualists.[75] Therefore, with the introduction of Qur’an readers, Qur’an schools, and “readers of fātiḥa” into the delta, the relatively fluid and expansive cosmology of pre-Muslim eastern Bengal began to resolve into one favoring the primacy of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad. As Peel puts it, religion began to acquire “a rigid basis.”

Further facilitating the growth of this “religion of the Book” in Bengal was the diffusion of paper and of papermaking technology. Introduced from Central Asia into North India in the thirteenth century by Persianized Turks, by the fifteenth century the technology of paper production had found its way into Bengal, where it eventually replaced the palm leaf.[76] Already in 1432, the Chinese visitor Ma Huan remarked that the Bengalis’ “paper is white; it is made out of the bark of a tree, and is as smooth and glossy as deer’s skin.”[77] And by the close of the sixteenth century the poet Mukundaram noted the presence of whole communities of Muslim papermakers (kāgajī) in Bengali cities.[78]The revolutionary impact that the technology of literacy made on premodern Bengali society is suggested in the ordinary Bengali words for paper (kāgaj) and pen (kalam), both of which are corrupted loan words from Perso-Arabic. It is also significant that on Bengal’s expanding agrarian frontier, the introduction of papermaking technology coincided with the rise of a Muslim religious gentry whose authority structure was ultimately based on the written word—scripture. While it would be the crudest technological determinism to say that the diffusion of paper production simply caused the growth of Islam in Bengal or elsewhere, it is certainly true that this more efficient technology of knowledge led to more books, which in turn promoted a greater familiarity with at least the idea of literacy, and that this greater familiarity led, in turn, to the association of the written word with religious authority.

Serving to check the growth of the “religion of the Book,” however, was the fact that the book in question, the Qur’an, was written in a language unknown to the masses of Bengali society. Moreover, since the Qur’an had been revealed in Arabic, in Bengal as elsewhere fear of tampering with the word of God inhibited its outright translation. As we have seen, Bengali Muslims were extremely reluctant to translate even Islamic popular lore into Bengali. Of course, they could have done what many other non-Arab Muslims did—that is, retain their own language for written discourse but render it in the Arabic script, as happened in Iran (modern Persian) and North India (Urdu). The transliteration of any language into Arabic script not only facilitates the assimilation of Arabic vocabulary but fosters a psychological bond between non-Arab and Arab Muslims. In the seventeenth century, in fact, attempts were made to do the same for Bengali. The Dhaka Museum has a manuscript work composed in 1645 entitled Maqtul Husain—a tract treating the death of Husain at Karbala—written in Bengali but using the Arabic, and not the Bengali, script.[79] Although subsequent writers made similar such literary attempts,[80] it is significant that the effort never took hold, with the result that Bengali Muslims remain today the world’s largest body of Muslims who, despite Islamization, have retained both their language and their script.[81]

Since Islamic scripture was neither translated nor transliterated in premodern Bengal, it not surprisingly first entered mass culture in a magical, as opposed to liturgical, context. In Ksemananda’s Manasā-Maṅgala, a work composed in the mid seventeenth century, we hear that in the house of one of the poem’s Hindu figures (Laksmindhara, son of Chand), a copy of the Qur’an was kept along with other charms for the purpose of warding off evil influence.[82] From the remarks of Vijaya Gupta, a poet of East Bengal’s Barisal region, who wrote in 1494,[83] we find an even earlier reference to the same use of Muslim scripture. In this instance, the written word appeared not in a Hindu household but in the hands of a mullā. A group of seven weavers, evidently Muslims, since they resided in “Husainhati,” were bitten by snakes unleashed by the goddess Manasa and went to the court of the qāẓī seeking help. Wrote the poet:

There was a teacher of the Qāḍī named Khālās…who always engaged himself in the study of the Qur’an and other religious books.…He said, if you ask me, I say, why are you afraid of demons [bhūt], when you have got the religious books. Write (extracts) from the book and hang it down the neck. If then also the demons (implying snakes) bite, I shall be held responsible. The Qāḍī accepted what the Mullā said and all present took amulet from him (the Mullā).[84]

Here we see a Muslim ritualist mediating on the people’s behalf with a class of ubiquitous spirits, bhūt, that pervaded (and still pervades) the folk Bengali cosmology.[85]Moreover, the mullā clearly used the scripture in a magical and not a liturgical context, for it was not by reading the holy book that he dealt with evil spirits but by having his clients wear written extracts from it around their necks—a usage that enjoyed the endorsement of the state-appointed Muslim judge, or qāẓī.[86] In modern times, too, one finds ritualists employing the magical power of the Qur’an for healing purposes in precisely the manner that mullās had done three centuries earlier. In 1898 an ojhā, a local shamanlike ritualist, was observed in a village in Sylhet District using Qur’anic passages in his treatment of persons possessed by bhūts.[87] And in recent years ojhās among the non-Muslim Chakma tribesmen of the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been integrating Muslim scripture and Islamic superhuman agencies into their healing rituals, indicating the continued penetration of Islamic religious culture beyond the delta and into the adjacent mountains.[88]

On the other hand, European observers noted that Bengali mullās also used the Qur’an in purely liturgical, as opposed to magical, contexts. In 1833 Francis Buchanan observed that in rural Dinajpur, mullās “read, or repeat prayers or passages of the Koran at marriages, funerals, circumcisions, and sacrifices, for no Muslim will eat meat or fowl, over which prayers have not been repeated, before it has been killed.…According to the Kazis, many of these Mollas cannot read, and these only look at the book, while they repeat the passages.”[89] Although the mullās observed by Buchanan were themselves unable to read, they were nonetheless understood by their village clients to be tapping into a transcendent source of power, the written word, fundamentally greater and more permanent than those known to local ritualists. In the same way, it was reported in 1898 that Muslim villagers in Sylhet “employ Mullahs to read Koran Shariff and allow the merit thereof to be credited to the forefathers”[90]—an apparent reference to the same kind of fātiḥa rituals that sanads of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had authorized for rural mosques and shrines.

All of this points to a progressive expansion in the countryside of the culture of literacy—that is, a tendency to confer authority on written religious texts and on persons associated with them (whether or not they could read those texts). This expanding culture of literacy naturally facilitated the growth of the cult of those superhuman agencies with which that culture was most clearly identified. In short, as the idea of “the book-as-authority” grew among ever-widening circles of East Bengal’s rural society—a development clearly traceable from the sixteenth century—so too did the “religion of the Book,” with its emphasis on the cosmological supremacy of Allah.​

I had selected this passage as one of those to be reproduced, before, to my consternation, you took umbrage. It was chosen for much the same reason as you did, which is plain to read and comprehend.

Incidentally the use of phrases and sections of the Quran Sharif is still in use; they sometimes are placed within a taveez as a replacement for the magical formulae and numerological esoterics otherwise in use.

 

[jarves]

Assam is not even in Bangladesh or part of Bengal! So where does that come from!? Okay listen, shit iron. I don't care, so stop bothering me now! And I don't give a damn about Assam!

You are dumber than i thought,read the posts above the post which you have quoted.

No, you interpreted me wrong. And you think you are always right. You are so narcissistic!

I interpreted it perfectly.You are a liar or you have serious comprehension issues.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Eaton does mention Western Java where Islam spread with Agrarian expansion similar to Bengal, I have highlighted it in bold in post #456 of this page.

Yes, indeed, I had noticed, but felt it could do with a different level of detailed analysis. No doubt he has referred to such works in his notes (I am compiling the books within them to try and expand my library; far from being a reasonably good cover, it turns out to be peculiarly skewed. How I wish I was rich, or that the university was).
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An appeal to those participating in this thread: those who wish to troll and slay trolls, could you, very kindly, keep your posts in the colour teal? This will help us to skip those and get to others of our interest.
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Why were Baidyas zamindars only in east Bengal, rarely, or never, in the west?

 

[kalu_miah]

Yes, indeed, I had noticed, but felt it could do with a different level of detailed analysis. No doubt he has referred to such works in his notes (I am compiling the books within them to try and expand my library; far from being a reasonably good cover, it turns out to be peculiarly skewed. How I wish I was rich, or that the university was).

An appeal to those participating in this thread: those who wish to troll and slay trolls, could you, very kindly, keep your posts in the colour teal? This will help us to skip those and get to others of our interest.

Why were Baidyas zamindars only in east Bengal, rarely, or never, in the west?

Good question, I am afraid I do not have much information on that subject.

I am going to have to take leave for now. I will get back to the thread later. Thanks for your interest and taking the time.

 

[asad71]

As it happens, we have gone over this ground before, perhaps in posts that may not have come to your attention. Please allow me to rehearse those arguments once more.

First, it is a fallacy referring to the Suri rulers as 'ours'. Please look at the time lines, and the movements of Sher Shah Suri. He was born outside Bengal, lived outside Bengal, and raided Bengal exactly once, to confront Mahmud Shah. When he toppled Mahmud Shah finally, in 1538, he never even went to Bengal, but sent his generals instead.

How can anyone claim this Afghan from Bihar as Bengali?

At (a), we encounter our old friend, the Migration Theory. This has been sufficiently discredited by Eaton; please read him again.

At (b), we encounter the Religion of Patronage Theory. You will appreciate that we either need to accept an argument or rebuff it with facts and deductions from those facts. It does not help merely to re-state it.

Point (c) puzzles me. Where do you locate these Afghan-Persians? The whole argument rotates around the circumstances that the initial locations of the Afghans were in the north and the west (of Bengal), and that the east remained impervious to Muslim presence until very late. Until the Mughals shifted their capital to Dhaka, there was no majority Muslim presence in east Bengal.

With your permission, I shall return to your post later.

1.Thank you. My concept of our habitat/homeland is the territory lying east of the Rajmahal Hills. This is the sovereign kingdom we had lost at Palassy. In ancient history Pataliputra (Patna) was our political capital and cultural center. The delta was largely unpopulated and covered with dense forest and wild animals. Gautama was our prince. Kalidas was ours. So was Chanokya. Aryabhata was a son of this soil.The Guptas, Nandas, Mauryas, Haryankas were dynasties that based in this land.Sher Shah Suri had made Sasaram our capital from where he had practically annexed the whole of Northern Hindustan.
INDIC
2.Urdu has been ousted from BD - almost physically.However, it has been installed as a state language in P/bangla.