Authorship, Reception, and Memory in Early Modern Bengal: Songs Attributed to Saiyad Sultān

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.5.2.0198
• Pages: 198-232
• Published date: 01 April 2020
• Date: 01 April 2020
• Author: Ayesha A. Irani
• Subject Matter: authorship,history and memory,Islam in South Asia,Sufism,Bengal,Bengali Vaiṣṇavism,Bāuls,song literature

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University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

AUTHORSHIP, RECEPTION, AND MEMORY IN

EARLY MODERN BENGAL: SONGS ATTRIBUTED

TO SAIYAD SULTĀN

Ayesha A. Irani

Abstract: This article examines issues of authorial memory and reception pertaining to

thirteen Bangla songs (padāvalī) ascribed to the seventeenth-century Bengali Sufi poet,

Saiyad Sultān. This author is best known for the Nabīvaṃśa (“The Prophet’s Lineage”)—

a universal history of the Prophet Muhammad. A manual on Sufi yoga entitled Jñāna

Pradīpa (“Lamp of Knowledge”) also holds the authorial signature “Saiyad Sultān,” as does

an acrostic poem on esoteric themes, entitled Jñāna Cautiśā (“The Thirty-Four Consonants

of Knowledge”). Ten Bangla songs are ascribed likewise, while three others hold the sig-

nature of “Sultān.” The Bengali literary historians M. E. Haq and Ahmad Sharif unques-

tioningly attributed all of these works to a single historical figure. This essay interrogates

such simplistic assumptions. After evaluating these songs in light of the authorial voices

of the Nabīvaṃśa and the Jñāna Pradīpa, I examine how authorial memory is encoded in

the Bangla literary tradition in multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways. Two frameworks

are proposed to interpret the conundrum of authorship of the corpus of works written in

the name of Saiyad Sultān.

Keywords: authorship, history and memory, Islam in South Asia, Sufism, Bengal, Bengali

Vaiṣṇavism, Bāuls, song literature

Saiyad Sultān is a seventeenth-century Sufi poet, well-known in the Bangla literary

tradition of East Bengal as the author of the Nabīvaṃśa (“The Prophet’s Lineage”),

the first universal history of the Prophet Muhammad written in Bangla.1 A set of ten

Bangla padāvalī bearing the authorial signature (bhaṇitā) of “Saiyad Sultān,” with

an additional three with the signature of “Sultān,”2 have come down to us in various

Bangla Rāgamālās or Rāganāmās. These compile verses written by early modern

Bengali authors, all set to rāgas (melodic modes) and tālas (rhythm cycles).3 Based

upon their imagery and themes, these thirteen songs can be divided into two broad

categories. The first of these include eight songs on the spiritual longings, goals,

and practices of the darveś (a dervish or Sufi spiritual adept). Many of these songs

elucidate the principles of the subtle body (dehatattva) and draw upon the vocabu-

lary of haṭha yoga. The second category includes no more than five songs, all

AUTHORSHIP, RECEPTION, AND MEMORY IN EARLY MODERN BENGAL 199

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signed by “Saiyad Sultān,” that incorporate Vaiṣṇava themes and images. On

account of their inclusion of the authorial signature “Saiyad Sultān” (or “Sultān”),

modern literary historians of East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh, such as

Muhammad Enamul Haq (1991 [1957]/1398 B.S.: 306–7) and Ahmad Sharif, fol-

lowing him, have uncritically accepted that all thirteen of these padāvalī were writ-

ten by a single historical personage, identical with the author of the Nabīvaṃśa.

Sharif, who edited the “collected” works of Saiyad Sultān, published these padāvalī

together with other works attributed to Saiyad Sultān.4 In this essay, I place this

slim set of songs in the context of the Nabīvaṃśa and other major works ascribed

to Saiyad Sultān in order to explore the multiple, even contradictory, ways in which

this author is received and remembered in East Bengal. An inquiry into the ways in

which Saiyad Sultān’s memory is encoded, in turn, forces us to examine the literary

engagement of East Bengali Sufis with various genres of song literature, such as

that of the Bāuls, on the one hand, and the Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇavas, on the other.

Beyond the immediate textual and philological issues that this study raises,

this essay points to larger historical questions concerning the fluidity of autho-

rial identities and texts, in terms of their composition, circulation, and reception

in Islamic South Asia. This discussion of textual practices in Bengal is under-

girded by tensions between religious identities and ideological perspectives—at

the level of authorship and reception, at the level of self and other—that are at

once constraining and generative of meaning. Early modern Bengal has its own

unique religious complexion—specific configurations of religious groups that

jostled for ascendancy. Study of these songs nonetheless highlights patterns of

socio-religious interaction—appropriation, competition, assimilation and multiple

shades of engagement in between—that are far from unique to Bengal, and indeed

relevant to much of premodern South Asia.

The Elusive Author: Authorship, Signature, and Authorial Voice

Saiyad Sultān (fl. 1615–45) was a renowned pīr and teacher of teachers of the

Caṭṭagrāma (Chittagong) region of Southeast Bengal. This region, along with

Arakan, is considered to be the well-spring of Islamic Bangla literature in the early

modern period. On account of its coveted harbor opening into the Bay of Bengal,

Caṭṭagrāma was a geo-political zone that was bitterly contested by Bengal, Arakan,

and Tripura. But from 1578 until its definitive Mughal conquest in 1666, roughly

coinciding with Saiyad Sultān’s lifetime, the region enjoyed a degree of stability

under the Theravāda Buddhist kings of Arakan.

Written in some 17,396 verses, approaching the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa in length

and ambition, the Nabīvaṃśa (“The Prophet’s Lineage”) is the first major work

to introduce Islamic doctrine to Bengalis in their mother-tongue. It is a literary

200 REORIENT

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milestone in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural history of Islam, and marks a sig-

nificant contribution to Bangla’s rich literary corpus. As a text that pioneered

the translation of Perso-Arabic works into Bangla, the Nabīvaṃśa became a

canonical work not only for its doctrinal content, but for the practice of trans-

lation among pre-modern Muslim Bengali intellectuals. The text translates, into

Bangla, tales from a range of para-Qurʾānic sources, particularly the Perso-Arabic

Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ (Tales of the Prophets) literature, composed by authors such as

ʿAbd Allāh al-Kisāʾī in Arabic (twelfth–thirteenth century),5 and in Persian by

Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Manṣūr ibn Khalaf al-Nīshābūrī6 and Muhammad Juwayrī

(tenth–eleventh century).7 Sultān’s work draws within its wide narrative sweep

the sacred beginnings of the cosmos through the Nūr Muhammad (the light of

Muhammad), the unfolding of sacred history through the line of the prophets,

and their apogee in the Prophet of Islam (Irani 2016). Preceding the line of tra-

ditional prophets is a series including specific Hindu deities, such as iva and

various avatāras of Viṣṇu, such as Rāma, all of whom fail to eradicate evil from

the earth. This leads to the eventual creation of Ādam, and after him the traditional

line of Islamic prophets including Hābil (Abel), iś (Seth), Idris (Enoch), Nūh

(Noah), Ibrāhim (Abraham), Musā (Moses), Dāud (David), Solemān (Solomon),

Jākāriyā (Zachariah), and Īsā (Jesus), whose stories are told in some detail, cul-

minating with the Prophet of Islam. Born of the idolatrous line of Kābil (Cain),

Hari (i.e. Kr

̥ṣṇa) is the only Hindu god who punctuates the line of Judeo-Islamic

prophets after Ādam. His tale-cycle falls between the tales of Ibrāhim and Musā,

and is indexical to the traditional tale-cycle of Yūsuf (Joseph) usually positioned

in the Persianate Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ literature between the tales of Ibrāhim and

Musā. Through the Nabīvaṃśa’s inclusion of this Muslim Kr

̥ṣṇa and the aiva

and Vaiṣṇava ‘apostles’ who precede Ādam, the Prophet Muhammad’s traditional

genealogy becomes uniquely augmented by Hindu gods-turned-into-prophets.

The tale-cycle of Hari is written as a parodic counter-narrative to the popular

tales of Kr

̥ṣṇa’s youth originally found in the Harivaṃśa and the tenth book of the

Bhāgavata Purāṇa.8 These tales circulated in Bengal through Bangla translation

in the Kr

̥ṣṇamaṅgala literature9 as well as through popular performance tradi-

tions of the Kr

̥ṣṇalīlā. So well-loved were these tales in Bengal that the author’s

stated purpose in his composition of the Nabīvaṃśa is to create a narrative on the

Prophet of Islam that could compete with the tales of Rāma and Kr

̥ṣṇa (Nabīvaṃśa

2:479). Saiyad Sultān’s account of Hari attempts to demote the Supreme Deity of

the Vaiṣṇavas to the status of a human prophet, who is subsumed within the hoary

line of prophets that preceded Muhammad. Furthermore, Hari is represented as

a sly debaucher who, misguided by the evil Iblis, lures beautiful married women

into adultery. The bitter polemics that surround the Hari episode in the Nabīvaṃśa,

as I have argued, show that the Nabīvaṃśa was written not merely to compete