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

Ayesha A Irani

doi:10.13169/reorient.5.2.0198

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 signature of “Sultān.” The Bengali literary historians M. E. Haq and Ahmad Sharif unquestioningly 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 Nabīvamśa 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.

Highlights

This article examines issues of authorial memory and reception pertaining to thirteen Bangla songs ascribed to the seventeenth-century Bengali Sufi poet, Saiyad Sultān
Authorship, Reception, and Memory in Early Modern Bengal signed by “Saiyad Sultān,” that incorporate Vaiṣṇava themes and images. On account of their inclusion of the authorial signature “Saiyad 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, following him, have uncritically accepted that all thirteen of these padāvalī were written by a single historical personage, identical with the author of the Nabīvaṃśa
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

Summary

Introduction

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. 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.

Results

Conclusion