Books by Thibaut d'Hubert
Meaningful Rituals: Persian, Arabic and Bengali in the Nūrnāma Tradition of Eastern Bengal explor... more Meaningful Rituals: Persian, Arabic and Bengali in the Nūrnāma Tradition of Eastern Bengal explores a corpus of texts that centre around the creation of the world by God through his prophet Muḥammad in his primordial form as a luminous entity. These short accounts, which bear the title Nūrnāma (The Book of Light), played two roles: as conveyers of knowledge regarding basic Islamic beliefs and cosmology, and as ritual texts meant to protect and bring prosperity to those who read and preserved the physical artefact of the book that contained that knowledge. In addition to introductory chapters on Muslim literacy in eastern Bengal and the treatment of light in scholastic and non-scholastic Muslim literature, Meaningful Rituals contains the text and annotated translations of several Persian and Bengali versions of the Nūrnāma, written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. A close study of this tradition in eastern Bengal demonstrates the rural literati’s engagement with Persian and Arabic languages and literacy. Beyond the domain of Bengali language and literature, the book opens a new chapter on Indo-Persian studies by shedding light on the didactic and ritual uses of Persian texts in rural Bengal.
In the Shade of the Golden Palace explores the work of the prolific Bengali poet Ālāol (fl. 1651-... more In the Shade of the Golden Palace explores the work of the prolific Bengali poet Ālāol (fl. 1651-71), who translated five narrative poems and one versified treatise from medieval Hindi and Persian into Bengali. The book maps the genres, structures, and themes of Ālāol's works, paying special attention to his discourse on poetics and his literary genealogy, which included Sanskrit, Avadhi, Maithili, Persian, and Bengali authors. D'Hubert focuses on courtly speech in Ālāol’s poetry, his revisiting of classical categories in a vernacular context, and the prominent role of performing arts in his conceptualization of the poetics of the written word. The foregrounding of this audacious theory of meaning in Ālāol’s poetry is a crucial contribution of the book, both in terms of general conceptual analysis and for its significance in the history of Bengali poetry.
This book shows how multilingual literacy fostered a variety of literary experiments in the remote kingdom of Arakan, which lay between present-day southeastern Bangladesh and Myanmar, in the mid-17th century. D'Hubert also presents a detailed analysis of Middle Bengali narrative poems, as well as translations of Old Maithili, Brajabuli, and Middle Bengali lyric poems that illustrate the major poetic styles in the regional courts of eastern South Asia. In the Shade of the Golden Palace therefore fulfills three functions: it is a unique guide for readers of Middle Bengali poetry, a detailed study of the cultural history of the frontier region of Arakan, and an original contribution to the poetics of South Asian literatures.
This paperback edition is only for sale in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar.
Articles and book chapters by Thibaut d'Hubert
L'adab toujours recommencé, 2023
The collection of stories titled Pañcatantra became emblematic of the circulation of literary te... more The collection of stories titled Pañcatantra became emblematic of the circulation of literary texts from India, through the Middle East and Europe. From Sanskrit to Pahlavi, Syriac or Arabic, and then Persian or Castilian (and this does not exhaust the list of languages), the many renderings of the Pañcatantra played various roles in shaping the ethical behaviors of literate societies throughout Eurasia. In the case of Arabic, Persian, and Castilian the translations of Kalīla wa-Dimna even contributed in major ways to the formation of literary prose. Since the last decades of the eighteenth century, scholars have studied the textual genealogy of this tradition and produced many editions, translations, and analyses of the several versions of this text. What I offer to do with this paper is to look at its journey back to India. I focus on one particular branch of the textual genealogy of Kalīla wa-Dimna that brings us from the Arabic version of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (ca. 102-139/720-756) up to Muṣtafá Khāliqdād ʿAbbāsī’s Persian Panchākiyāna (late 16th AD), which is a direct translation of the Sanskrit version compiled in 1199 by the Jain author Pūrṇabhadra. While following the path of the return of Kalīla wa-Dimna to India, rather than a formal study of the stories that each version contains, I pay attention to the discourses that surrounded its transmission. My aim is not to solve the philological puzzle of the diffusion of the text, but to understand its significance and the various aims of the rewritings of Kalīla wa-Dimna in the eastern Islamic world. The itinerary that I chose to follow brings us to reflect on the contrasted ways to conceive of the transmission of knowledge that originates from beyond one’s cultural horizon. The comments of the authors of the eastern versions of Kalīla wa-Dimna show that this text prompted a deep reflection on what constituted legitimate sources of knowledge and valid methods for the study of works that did not belong to the Arabic-Persian textual tradition.
Sensitive Reading: The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation, 2021
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
Bhavanagara, 2020
"The Forgotten Texts of the Regional Tongue: Bengali Manuscripts in Arabic Script"
The present a... more "The Forgotten Texts of the Regional Tongue: Bengali Manuscripts in Arabic Script"
The present article deals with the transposition of the linguistic and poetic matter from a regionally inflected mode of Indic textuality (called hinduẏānī by authors and copyists) to another one firmly grounded in an Arabic (one could even say Qurʾānic) episteme. My observations are based on the editing of two Bengali texts—a ritual text titled Nūrnāma (The Book of Light) and the romance Sayf al-Mulūk Badīʿ al-Jamāl—written in the Arabic script in the mid-nineteenth century. A first topic of inquiry has to do with the “space between words.” Besides commenting on the sociology of reading revealed by such texts, I focus on the relation between scribal practices and grammatical thought. Middle Bengali did not develop a grammatical tradition of its own, and scribal conventions are the only means we have to try and infer the grammatical understanding people had of the vernacular. The practice of continuous writing and the very limited recourse to orthoepic signs in manuscripts written in the Bengali script limit the possibilities of such an approach. The shift to the Arabic script and the rich apparatus of orthographical signs provide new insights into the grammatical understanding of Bengali language. Here the “text” is conceived synchronically and what is at stake is the reconstruction of an episteme that, although manifest through the textual artifact, did not constitute a science (i.e. Bengali grammar). Moreover, this manuscript tradition was hardly used to write the history of Bengali literature. Authors who discussed such texts, usually did so in a very dismissive way. Considering the ideological motivations of historians of Bengali literature is only part of the answer. What we need to ponder is the status of such manuscripts as “sources” for the history of Bengali language. These texts obviously failed to qualify as reliable witnesses of the cultural past of Bengal. Considered exogenous, the Arabic episteme could, in principle, not provide an access to whatever the text had to convey about its time and place. Or to be more precise, it was seen as a veil, a break in the transmission of the text; most of these manuscripts date from the nineteenth century AD and they were often copied from models written in the Bengali script. Through this case study, I address issues related to the adoption of western philological and historiographical methods in Bengal, and to the conceptual and empirical obstacles that rendered such texts “unreadable” by modern scholars.
The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, edited by Nile Green. Berkeley: University of California Press, , 2019
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2019
In the late eighteenth century a Scotsman returned from Bengal with one of the largest private li... more In the late eighteenth century a Scotsman returned from Bengal with one of the largest private libraries of Persian texts collected in the Subcontinent. Among those manuscripts were several volumes of translations of Arakanese and Pali texts into Persian, as well as quasi ethnographic accounts on Buddhism as it was practiced in what is seen today as the frontier region between South and Southeast Asia. In this article I look at this archive and the historical moment that surrounds its making in the perspective of the development of Buddhist studies. This large corpus of texts happened to be a false start in the history of the study of Theravāda Buddhism, but it constitutes a unique source to learn about local forms of Buddhism on the eve of the fall of the Arakanese kingdom and the integration of its religious institutions within the Burmese sangha. While discussing a selection of texts from this vast corpus, I pay special attention to the culturally layered transmission of knowledge on Arakanese Buddhism via the work of Bengali munshīs
(i.e., Persian secretary). I argue that this layered transmission caused the almost immediate obsolescence of this corpus as a source of information in the early colonial context. However, for the cultural historian, those Persian texts contrast with the then emerging institutionalised orientalist discourses and offer a new vantage point for the study of Arakanese Buddhism.
Iranian Studies, 2018
The document presented in this article is a quasi-ethnographic account of the religious customs o... more The document presented in this article is a quasi-ethnographic account of the religious customs of the Magh (i.e. Arakanese), which was most probably collected on the basis of firsthand observations made in the region of Chittagong, in southeastern Bengal, sometime in the 1780s, or early 1790s. The commissioner of the document is John Murray-MacGregor (1745–1822), a Scottish officer of the British East India Company, who remained in Bengal for about three decades and brought back with him one of the largest private collections of Persian manuscripts, as well as some bilingual Sanskrit–Persian texts, and twenty-two bundles of Pali and Arakanese manuscripts collected in eastern Bengal.
The literary history of Bengal is characterized by a multilingual ecology that nurtured the devel... more The literary history of Bengal is characterized by a multilingual ecology that nurtured the development of Middle Bengali literature. It is around the turn of the second millennium, during the Pāla period (c. 8th–12th century), that eastern South Asia became a major region for the production of literary texts in Sanskrit and Apabhramsha. Early on, Bengal developed a distinct literary identity within the Sanskrit tradition and, despite abrupt political transitions and the fragmentation of the landscape of literary patronage, fundamental aspects of the literary culture of Pāla Bengal were transmitted during later periods. It was during the Sultanate period, from the 14th century onward that courtly milieus began to cultivate Middle Bengali. This patronage was mostly provided by uppercaste Hindu dignitaries and (in the case of lyric poetry at least) by the Sultans themselves. During the period ranging from the 15th to the early 19th centuries, vernacular literature can be divided into two broad categories: short narrative forms called padas or gītas (songs), which were often composed in an idiom derived from songs by the Old Maithili poet Vidyāpati (c. 1370–1460); and long narrative forms in Middle Bengali called pā̃cālīs, which are characterized by the alternation of the prosodic forms called paẏār and tripadī and the occasional insertion of songs.
These poetic forms are the principal markers of the literary identity of Bengal and eastern South Asia (including Assam, Orissa, and Arakan). The Ḥusayn Shāhī period (1433–1486) contributed to the consolidation and expansion eastward of vernacular literary practices. Then, the political landscape became fragmented, and the multiplication of centers of literary production occurred. This fragmentation fostered the formation of new, locally grounded literary trends. These could involve the cultivation of specific genres, the propounding of various religious doctrines and ritual practices, the fashioning of new idioms fostered by either dialectal resources, classical idioms such as Sanskrit or Persian, and other vernacular poetic traditions (Maithili, Avadhi, Hindustani). The late Mughal and early colonial periods witnessed the making of new trends, characterized by a radical modification of the lexical component of the Middle Bengali idiom (i.e., Dobhāṣī), or the recourse to scripts other than Bengali (e.g., Sylhet Nagari/ Kaithi, Arabic). The making of such new trends often implied changes in the way that authors interacted with Sanskrit, Persian, and other vernacular traditions. For instance, Persian played as crucial a role as Sanskrit in the various trajectories that Middle Bengali poetry took. On the one hand, Persian in Bengal had a history distinct from that of Bengali; on the other hand, it constituted a major traditional model for Bengali authors and, at times, Persianate education replaced the one based on Sanskrit as the default way to access literacy.
Even if Middle Bengali poetic forms continued to be used in the context of various traditional performances, the making of a new literary language in the 19th century, the adoption of Western genres, and the development of prose and Western prosodic forms occasioned a radical break with premodern literary practices. From the second half of the 19th century, with the notable exception of some ritual and sectarian texts, access to the ancient literature of Bengal began to be mediated by philological analysis and textual criticism.
Keywords: Bengal, Bengali, Brajabuli, Sanskrit, Persian, Avadhi, Urdu, multilingualism, lyric poetry, narrative poetry
Full version available at: http://asianhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-39
With this article, I propose to revisit a corpus of multilingual inscriptions on coins, as well a... more With this article, I propose to revisit a corpus of multilingual inscriptions on coins, as well as one Persian stone inscription, whose dates range from the fifteenth to the first half of the seventeenth centuries of the Mrauk U period of Arakan (ca. 1430−1784). My primary aim is to revise the readings of some of those inscriptions and, with these revisions in mind, to reassess the significance of such texts in light of recent scholarship on the Mrauk U period. Rather than derive conclusions based on anecdotal evidence of the existence of an Islamicate idiom in Arakan during this period, I observe the internal features of those inscriptions and possible readings that could be made of the message they contain. I also extend my analysis beyond coin inscriptions and trace the various forms of the Arakanese royal title “Lord of the Elephant” and its use as a generic epithet associated with political power in later (ca. 17th−18th CE) Bengali Muslim literature.
The divorce between music and poetry is a fairly recent phenomenon and naturally not recognised b... more The divorce between music and poetry is a fairly recent phenomenon and naturally not recognised by all, but it is usually widely accepted that poems are first and foremost texts that demand to be understood with the tools of textual analysis. In the case of premodern Bengali literature, however, neglecting the fact that texts were performed leads to a misunderstanding, not only of the way poems were composed, but also of the dynamics at work in the formation of the literary tradition as a whole. The texts I am dealing with in this article are panchalis, a type of Bengali narrative poem. Though the exact origin of the term remains unknown, panchali refers more to a kind of public performance than to a literary form or a genre.3 In this paper I propose to study the various levels of performance that shaped the compositional pattern of the Bengali panchali author Alaol. […]
Whereas an abundant literature is available on the political situation of Muslims in Arakan, as w... more Whereas an abundant literature is available on the political situation of Muslims in Arakan, as well as reports on the conditions of living of Rohingyas in refugee camps in Bangladesh and Thailand, the cultural history of the Muslim population of the region remains almost entirely unknown. The literature on the subject comprises some scholarship on the Bengali literature produced in seventeenth-century Arakan, or on the political relations between Bengal and Arakan during this period. We also have some histories of the Muslims of Arakan written in English by contemporary scholars, as well as a handful of academic publications in English that deal with political history and, to a lesser extent, literature. Except for a few studies surveying the Bengali literature produced in Arakan and a few articles on the role of Muslims in the Arakanese kingdom, the lack of references to primary sources is a striking feature of the literature dealing with Islam in the region. Therefore, after an overview of the history of the presence of Islam in southeastern Bengal and Arakan, I will provide a survey of the neglected primary sources that are still available to write this history. [...]
The present article discusses how Ālāol, the famous poet of seventeenth-century Arakan, conceived... more The present article discusses how Ālāol, the famous poet of seventeenth-century Arakan, conceived of the task of translating Awadhi and Persian texts into the 'language of the payār meter', that is to say Bengali. After a brief introduction to the well-known life and works of Ālāol, I highlight some features of the literary multilingualism prevalent during the poet's time in the kingdom of Arakan. Then, I proceed with an analysis of his discourse on 'translation' scrutinizing the terms and expressions he used to describe the process of textual transposition from one language to another. My comments attempt at providing a more detailed account of what is often called bhāvānuvāda by scholars of Bengali literature. What comes out of my observations is that Ālāol's dynamic approach to translation is grounded in reading practices evincing his familiarity with Sanskrit and Indo-Persian hermeneutic traditions. Translation implied an active intervention on the source text and, beyond the mere transmission of its meaning, further elaborations on its aesthetic content - all of which were conditioned by traditional textual hermeneutics. Finally, as an invitation to further reflection on the topic, I argue that this very specific approach to textual transposition was misunderstood and abandoned in modern times for the sake of different, and aesthetically less engaged, methods of translation.
In the present article I propose to study the production and diffusion of manuscripts containing ... more In the present article I propose to study the production and diffusion of manuscripts containing Bengali texts (treatises, narrative and lyric poetry) composed by Muslim authors that were collected in the eastern regions of today’s Bangladesh (Comilla and Chittagong). My work relies on research work led at the collections of the Bangla Academy and Dhaka University during recent years. Despite the relatively narrow geographical space – an area of approximately 350 km from North to South and 150 km from East to West - within which those texts were circulating and the short span of time during which these were produced (from the late eighteenth up to the early twentieth century), this manuscript tradition displays an impressive diversity of formats, alphabets and kinds of readership. Drawing on a survey of the data provided by catalogues and the
study of some colophons, I observe in which milieus and to what ends those manuscripts have been copied. The results of this study also contribute to a reflection on the evolution
of regional literary traditions in the rural areas of eastern Bengal.
Our perception of cultural identities and their geographical location is often biased by argument... more Our perception of cultural identities and their geographical location is often biased by arguments that treat modern nations as a timeless framework, whereas the boundaries of modern nations actually conceal the different structures that predate the modern world. In this essay, I propose to study some aspects of the literary culture and history of Arakan in the seventeenth century, an area which has not been considered as a cultural and political unit of its own because of its interstitial geographical location between modern Bangladesh and Myanmar. My central concern will be the use of languages in this highly multicultural area and the formation of a literary corpus using one of these languages, namely Bengali. We will see that the Bengali language served as an intermediary between the local sphere and the networks of the Bay of Bengal, in which the kingdom occupied a place of growing importance. [...]
This article explores the contrasting visions of world geography prevailing around the Bay of Ben... more This article explores the contrasting visions of world geography prevailing around the Bay of Bengal in the 17th century,
namely in Aceh and Arakan. After a preliminary study of the geographical horizons of Bengali and Malay literature, the
authors proceed to an analysis and comparison of the world descriptions of the religious scholar Nur al-Din al-Rānīrī and
of the Bengali poet Ālāol, having worked respectively in Aceh and Mrauk-U. This inquiry into the perceptions of the world is
conceived as a first step toward a deeper understanding of the attitudes towards regional cultures in the 17th century, at a
time when cosmopolitan languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian gave way to regional languages, such as Bengali
and Malay.
The Timurid capital city of Herat was a major center for the literary life of the Persian speakin... more The Timurid capital city of Herat was a major center for the literary life of the Persian speaking world in the 15th century. The most influential author of this period is ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 1492), a Muslim mystic and a court poet, considered as the 'seal of the poets' (khātam al-shuʿarā) of Persian classical literary tradition. In this article, I propose to study the reception of Jāmī's works in eastern Bengal during the 17th century. First, I treat the topic of the reception of his texts in various milieus in South Asia throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Then I study the case of the Bengali translation of one of his mathnawīs - narrative poems - entitled Yūsuf u Zulaikhā. This poem was composed in 1484 and it is based upon the Biblical and Qurʾanic story of Joseph, the wife of the ʿazīz of Egypt Potiphar. Ābdul Hākim's Bengali translation that approximately dates from the middle of the l 7th century is embedded in the context of the adoption of Islam by the rural populations of eastern Bengal. On the one hand, I mention the acclimatization of a master-piece of Persian court poetry to the cultural context of Bengal. And, on the other hand, l analyze the use of the characters of the two lovers of the Islamic tradition for proselytizing ends. I also show that their story was a model of love relationship alternative to that of Rādhā and Kr̥ṣṇa which was then highly controversial.
This article discusses the story of the king Harishcandra, ancestor of the prince Râma as it is t... more This article discusses the story of the king Harishcandra, ancestor of the prince Râma as it is told in the Bengali version of the Râmâyana composed by the poet Krittivâsa in the XVth century. This story is not found in the Sanskrit version attributed to the poet Vâlmîki and is considered an accretion to main Râma story. Harishchandra’s story met with great success in South Asia thanks to its edifying character and its potential on the esthetic level. It has been adapted through the centuries into various languages and literary genres of the region. Having put this narrative back in the larger context of the literary Indian tradition and providing some comments on the specificities of the Bengali version. I propose in this article an annotated translation of the story of Harishcandra.
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Books by Thibaut d'Hubert
This book shows how multilingual literacy fostered a variety of literary experiments in the remote kingdom of Arakan, which lay between present-day southeastern Bangladesh and Myanmar, in the mid-17th century. D'Hubert also presents a detailed analysis of Middle Bengali narrative poems, as well as translations of Old Maithili, Brajabuli, and Middle Bengali lyric poems that illustrate the major poetic styles in the regional courts of eastern South Asia. In the Shade of the Golden Palace therefore fulfills three functions: it is a unique guide for readers of Middle Bengali poetry, a detailed study of the cultural history of the frontier region of Arakan, and an original contribution to the poetics of South Asian literatures.
Articles and book chapters by Thibaut d'Hubert
The present article deals with the transposition of the linguistic and poetic matter from a regionally inflected mode of Indic textuality (called hinduẏānī by authors and copyists) to another one firmly grounded in an Arabic (one could even say Qurʾānic) episteme. My observations are based on the editing of two Bengali texts—a ritual text titled Nūrnāma (The Book of Light) and the romance Sayf al-Mulūk Badīʿ al-Jamāl—written in the Arabic script in the mid-nineteenth century. A first topic of inquiry has to do with the “space between words.” Besides commenting on the sociology of reading revealed by such texts, I focus on the relation between scribal practices and grammatical thought. Middle Bengali did not develop a grammatical tradition of its own, and scribal conventions are the only means we have to try and infer the grammatical understanding people had of the vernacular. The practice of continuous writing and the very limited recourse to orthoepic signs in manuscripts written in the Bengali script limit the possibilities of such an approach. The shift to the Arabic script and the rich apparatus of orthographical signs provide new insights into the grammatical understanding of Bengali language. Here the “text” is conceived synchronically and what is at stake is the reconstruction of an episteme that, although manifest through the textual artifact, did not constitute a science (i.e. Bengali grammar). Moreover, this manuscript tradition was hardly used to write the history of Bengali literature. Authors who discussed such texts, usually did so in a very dismissive way. Considering the ideological motivations of historians of Bengali literature is only part of the answer. What we need to ponder is the status of such manuscripts as “sources” for the history of Bengali language. These texts obviously failed to qualify as reliable witnesses of the cultural past of Bengal. Considered exogenous, the Arabic episteme could, in principle, not provide an access to whatever the text had to convey about its time and place. Or to be more precise, it was seen as a veil, a break in the transmission of the text; most of these manuscripts date from the nineteenth century AD and they were often copied from models written in the Bengali script. Through this case study, I address issues related to the adoption of western philological and historiographical methods in Bengal, and to the conceptual and empirical obstacles that rendered such texts “unreadable” by modern scholars.
(i.e., Persian secretary). I argue that this layered transmission caused the almost immediate obsolescence of this corpus as a source of information in the early colonial context. However, for the cultural historian, those Persian texts contrast with the then emerging institutionalised orientalist discourses and offer a new vantage point for the study of Arakanese Buddhism.
These poetic forms are the principal markers of the literary identity of Bengal and eastern South Asia (including Assam, Orissa, and Arakan). The Ḥusayn Shāhī period (1433–1486) contributed to the consolidation and expansion eastward of vernacular literary practices. Then, the political landscape became fragmented, and the multiplication of centers of literary production occurred. This fragmentation fostered the formation of new, locally grounded literary trends. These could involve the cultivation of specific genres, the propounding of various religious doctrines and ritual practices, the fashioning of new idioms fostered by either dialectal resources, classical idioms such as Sanskrit or Persian, and other vernacular poetic traditions (Maithili, Avadhi, Hindustani). The late Mughal and early colonial periods witnessed the making of new trends, characterized by a radical modification of the lexical component of the Middle Bengali idiom (i.e., Dobhāṣī), or the recourse to scripts other than Bengali (e.g., Sylhet Nagari/ Kaithi, Arabic). The making of such new trends often implied changes in the way that authors interacted with Sanskrit, Persian, and other vernacular traditions. For instance, Persian played as crucial a role as Sanskrit in the various trajectories that Middle Bengali poetry took. On the one hand, Persian in Bengal had a history distinct from that of Bengali; on the other hand, it constituted a major traditional model for Bengali authors and, at times, Persianate education replaced the one based on Sanskrit as the default way to access literacy.
Even if Middle Bengali poetic forms continued to be used in the context of various traditional performances, the making of a new literary language in the 19th century, the adoption of Western genres, and the development of prose and Western prosodic forms occasioned a radical break with premodern literary practices. From the second half of the 19th century, with the notable exception of some ritual and sectarian texts, access to the ancient literature of Bengal began to be mediated by philological analysis and textual criticism.
Keywords: Bengal, Bengali, Brajabuli, Sanskrit, Persian, Avadhi, Urdu, multilingualism, lyric poetry, narrative poetry
Full version available at: http://asianhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-39
study of some colophons, I observe in which milieus and to what ends those manuscripts have been copied. The results of this study also contribute to a reflection on the evolution
of regional literary traditions in the rural areas of eastern Bengal.
namely in Aceh and Arakan. After a preliminary study of the geographical horizons of Bengali and Malay literature, the
authors proceed to an analysis and comparison of the world descriptions of the religious scholar Nur al-Din al-Rānīrī and
of the Bengali poet Ālāol, having worked respectively in Aceh and Mrauk-U. This inquiry into the perceptions of the world is
conceived as a first step toward a deeper understanding of the attitudes towards regional cultures in the 17th century, at a
time when cosmopolitan languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian gave way to regional languages, such as Bengali
and Malay.
This book shows how multilingual literacy fostered a variety of literary experiments in the remote kingdom of Arakan, which lay between present-day southeastern Bangladesh and Myanmar, in the mid-17th century. D'Hubert also presents a detailed analysis of Middle Bengali narrative poems, as well as translations of Old Maithili, Brajabuli, and Middle Bengali lyric poems that illustrate the major poetic styles in the regional courts of eastern South Asia. In the Shade of the Golden Palace therefore fulfills three functions: it is a unique guide for readers of Middle Bengali poetry, a detailed study of the cultural history of the frontier region of Arakan, and an original contribution to the poetics of South Asian literatures.
The present article deals with the transposition of the linguistic and poetic matter from a regionally inflected mode of Indic textuality (called hinduẏānī by authors and copyists) to another one firmly grounded in an Arabic (one could even say Qurʾānic) episteme. My observations are based on the editing of two Bengali texts—a ritual text titled Nūrnāma (The Book of Light) and the romance Sayf al-Mulūk Badīʿ al-Jamāl—written in the Arabic script in the mid-nineteenth century. A first topic of inquiry has to do with the “space between words.” Besides commenting on the sociology of reading revealed by such texts, I focus on the relation between scribal practices and grammatical thought. Middle Bengali did not develop a grammatical tradition of its own, and scribal conventions are the only means we have to try and infer the grammatical understanding people had of the vernacular. The practice of continuous writing and the very limited recourse to orthoepic signs in manuscripts written in the Bengali script limit the possibilities of such an approach. The shift to the Arabic script and the rich apparatus of orthographical signs provide new insights into the grammatical understanding of Bengali language. Here the “text” is conceived synchronically and what is at stake is the reconstruction of an episteme that, although manifest through the textual artifact, did not constitute a science (i.e. Bengali grammar). Moreover, this manuscript tradition was hardly used to write the history of Bengali literature. Authors who discussed such texts, usually did so in a very dismissive way. Considering the ideological motivations of historians of Bengali literature is only part of the answer. What we need to ponder is the status of such manuscripts as “sources” for the history of Bengali language. These texts obviously failed to qualify as reliable witnesses of the cultural past of Bengal. Considered exogenous, the Arabic episteme could, in principle, not provide an access to whatever the text had to convey about its time and place. Or to be more precise, it was seen as a veil, a break in the transmission of the text; most of these manuscripts date from the nineteenth century AD and they were often copied from models written in the Bengali script. Through this case study, I address issues related to the adoption of western philological and historiographical methods in Bengal, and to the conceptual and empirical obstacles that rendered such texts “unreadable” by modern scholars.
(i.e., Persian secretary). I argue that this layered transmission caused the almost immediate obsolescence of this corpus as a source of information in the early colonial context. However, for the cultural historian, those Persian texts contrast with the then emerging institutionalised orientalist discourses and offer a new vantage point for the study of Arakanese Buddhism.
These poetic forms are the principal markers of the literary identity of Bengal and eastern South Asia (including Assam, Orissa, and Arakan). The Ḥusayn Shāhī period (1433–1486) contributed to the consolidation and expansion eastward of vernacular literary practices. Then, the political landscape became fragmented, and the multiplication of centers of literary production occurred. This fragmentation fostered the formation of new, locally grounded literary trends. These could involve the cultivation of specific genres, the propounding of various religious doctrines and ritual practices, the fashioning of new idioms fostered by either dialectal resources, classical idioms such as Sanskrit or Persian, and other vernacular poetic traditions (Maithili, Avadhi, Hindustani). The late Mughal and early colonial periods witnessed the making of new trends, characterized by a radical modification of the lexical component of the Middle Bengali idiom (i.e., Dobhāṣī), or the recourse to scripts other than Bengali (e.g., Sylhet Nagari/ Kaithi, Arabic). The making of such new trends often implied changes in the way that authors interacted with Sanskrit, Persian, and other vernacular traditions. For instance, Persian played as crucial a role as Sanskrit in the various trajectories that Middle Bengali poetry took. On the one hand, Persian in Bengal had a history distinct from that of Bengali; on the other hand, it constituted a major traditional model for Bengali authors and, at times, Persianate education replaced the one based on Sanskrit as the default way to access literacy.
Even if Middle Bengali poetic forms continued to be used in the context of various traditional performances, the making of a new literary language in the 19th century, the adoption of Western genres, and the development of prose and Western prosodic forms occasioned a radical break with premodern literary practices. From the second half of the 19th century, with the notable exception of some ritual and sectarian texts, access to the ancient literature of Bengal began to be mediated by philological analysis and textual criticism.
Keywords: Bengal, Bengali, Brajabuli, Sanskrit, Persian, Avadhi, Urdu, multilingualism, lyric poetry, narrative poetry
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study of some colophons, I observe in which milieus and to what ends those manuscripts have been copied. The results of this study also contribute to a reflection on the evolution
of regional literary traditions in the rural areas of eastern Bengal.
namely in Aceh and Arakan. After a preliminary study of the geographical horizons of Bengali and Malay literature, the
authors proceed to an analysis and comparison of the world descriptions of the religious scholar Nur al-Din al-Rānīrī and
of the Bengali poet Ālāol, having worked respectively in Aceh and Mrauk-U. This inquiry into the perceptions of the world is
conceived as a first step toward a deeper understanding of the attitudes towards regional cultures in the 17th century, at a
time when cosmopolitan languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian gave way to regional languages, such as Bengali
and Malay.
Le domaine linguistique bengali qui recouvre une large partie du nord-est du sous-continent indien s’est développé dans un contexte multilingue. Malgré la diversité linguistique de cette région on observe un développement non-centralisé, mais cependant relativement homogène des pratiques scripturaires. Une manière de définir le domaine culturel bengali consisterait à observer l’espace géographique couvert par l’usage de l’alphabet dit « bengali ». Cet alphabet était quasiment exclusivement utilisé pour écrire à la fois la langue sanskrite et les formes littéraires des langues régionales du XIVe siècle jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle, qui vit l’émergence de nouvelles pratiques scripturaires dans des contextes géographiquement très restreins (à Sylhet et dans le sud-est, à Chittagong et en Arakan). L’usage de l’alphabet bengali pour écrire différentes langues par des auteurs de diverses confessions religieuses ne semble pas avoir occasionné de débats jusqu’au milieu du XVIIe siècle. C’est durant cette période, dans les sud-est du Bengale, que certains auteurs musulmans se virent contraints de justifier leur recours à un alphabet « hindou » (hinduẏānī) pour écrire des textes ayant trait à l’Islam. Ce débat contribua sans doute à l’adoption de l’alphabet arabe dans la région de Chittagong. C’est à travers l’étude de ce corpus de manuscrits datant pour la plupart du XIXe siècle que nous aborderons le sujet du rapport entre grammaire et écriture dans le domaine bengali.
A l’instar des autres langues vernaculaires du nord du sous-continent indien, nous ne disposons d’aucune tradition grammaticale pour l’apprentissage et l’étude de la langue bengali jusqu’à la période coloniale. L’étude des pratiques scripturaires et des méthodes de transcription de la langue vernaculaire nous permet cependant d’inférer la manière dont les copistes concevaient certains aspects de la morphologie et de la phonétique de la langue vernaculaire. La régularité des conventions adoptées varie ostensiblement d’un manuscrit à un autre selon qu’il s’agisse d’un scribe professionnel ou d’un copiste occasionnel. Souvent la connaissance du sanskrit, qui fournissait alors un cadre analytique et pédagogique en l’absence d’une tradition grammaticale propre à la langue vernaculaire, pouvait contribuer à la systématisation du mode de transcription des textes en bengali. Mais certaines pratiques scripturaires associées au sanskrit, telle que l’usage de l’écriture continue, peuvent aussi être vu comme un obstacle à l’émergence d’une conceptualisation grammaticale de la langue vernaculaire.
Bien que circonscrite à une période et un espace géographique limités, la tradition manuscrite que je propose d’étudier fournit une approche radicalement différente de la langue vernaculaire à travers l’usage de l’alphabet et des conventions orthographiques et orthoépiques de l’arabe classique. Après avoir introduit les circonstances dans lesquels certains copistes musulmans de la région de Chittagong ont décidé de se tourner vers la tradition arabe pour transcrire la langue vernaculaire, nous observerons les conséquences de l’adoption de l’alphabet et de certaines conventions orthographiques arabes sur la transcription du bengali. Nous verrons que l’usage de ce système permet de distinguer comment les copistes concevaient la morphologie de la langue vernaculaire en représentant graphiquement le début et la fin de chaque unité lexicale. Le recours à l’alphabet arabe permet également une plus grande précision sur le plan phonologique et pour l’étude de la prosodie – tous les textes dont nous disposons étant versifiés. Mais il serait erroné de voir dans ce système une simple tentative de rationalisation de la transcription de la langue vernaculaire : cette pratique scripturaire comporte également des conventions qui ne peuvent s’expliquer que du point de vue de la langue arabe ou dans le cadre particulier de la digraphie arabe-bengali. L’étude de ce corpus ouvre un nouveau chapitre l’histoire de langue bengali et vient s’ajouter au vaste domaine de la diffusion des pratiques scripturaires arabes dans le monde musulman.