Building on the foundation of the west-east shift of political and agrarian frontiers, Richard Eaton, in The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (1993), suggests that there was a 'seepage' of Islamic ideals into the local culture and it was their inclusion and interaction one with the other over a period of three centuries which resulted in the development of an acculturated and syncretistic Islamic tradition. The first phase, from the sixteenth century, was gradual and contextualised. The Syncretistic Tradition: 16th to 19th Centuries Of course, there were numerous factors involved in the Islamisation of Bengal which occurred over two main historical phases and which are clearly reflected in the Muslim Bengali literature: the development of a syncretistic tradition from the sixteenth century, followed by a pan-Islamic reaction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Approximately 135 million Bengali Muslims living in Bangladesh and the Indian State of Bengal today testify to such processes of Islamisation, but Islamists and historians alike have long been baffled by how and why Islam spread so effectively in this region from the sixteenth century when it did not flourish in other parts of the Indian Subcontinent - especially when we learn that the majority of the local population embraced the religion of their Mughal rulers who did not, as a matter of policy, promote the conversion of Bengalis to Islam. The function of the Siloṭi Nagri tradition of p uthi-poṛa has to be understood in the context of the wider historical processes of Islamisation in the Bengal deltaic region.
#Bangla puthi path free#
Indeed, some have argued that Siloṭi Nagri was developed specifically for the purpose of disseminating Islamic ideals - one free from the taint of Hinduism, which Bengali (along with Devanagari and Oriya) was not, reserved as it had been historically for writing sacred (i.e. This does not minimise the Sylheti contribution, nor indeed the uniqueness of the texts written in the Siloṭi Nagri script rather, when the historical context is properly understood, one could argue that the Siloṭi Nagri puthi tradition is an example par excellence of the efforts of their authors to bridge the linguistic and religious divide in communicating Islam to the masses in their vernacular.īut there is another point to consider, raised by the above, which is particularly significant when considering the historical context and function of the wider puthi tradition and its performance, and that is that there are both Hindu and Islamic puthi traditions and Hindu and Islamic expressions of puthi-poṛa, the former pre-dating the latter. The connection between these two religious traditions is outlined below, but it is important to note here that the Siloṭi Nagri puthi tradition is almost exclusively Islamic. The Siloṭi Nagri p uthis - manuscript and printed - and their performance find themselves as regional expressions of a wider Bengali tradition. It's important to clarify that puthi-poṛa is not an exclusively Sylheti tradition, just as the puthis themselves were never exclusively written in Siloṭi Nagri.
Puthi-poṛa is, in fact, a tradition of musical performance, captured by the phrase coined by David Kane (2008) in his PhD on the subject as 'melodic reading'. This in and of itself does not sound that remarkable - for what do people do with books if not read them?! But it is how these puthis are read, and the contexts in which such readings take place, that tell us that p uthi-poṛa is more than just a scanning or verbalisation of ancient texts for private, or even public interest and enjoyment. Puthi-poṛa literally, therefore, just means 'book or manuscript reading'. A puthi is a 'book or manuscript' and poṛa simply means 'to read' or 'to recite'. Puthi-poṛa (or puthi-paṭh) is the name given to the performance of the puthi literature.
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