Metrik und Poetik der Josephsgeschichte Muhammad Sagirs

Abstract

Discussions of middle Bengali Muslim works have rarely focused on the aesthetic dimensions of this strand of literature. The in-depth analysis of the earliest Bengali version of the famous tale of Joseph and Zulaikha attempted here shows its connections to many Islamic literary traditions, such as the stories of the prophets, the matnawi (in this case of ʿAbd ar-Rahman Gami) and the north Indian 'premakhyan'. Most importantly, however, the focus on the poetic form also allows reconstructing the story’s re-creation along a specific aesthetics of performance and response. While the new ending that is added in the Bengali version in many ways reflect the work’s embeddedness in North Indian literary traditions and the history of regionalization during the late Mogul empire, the most important means for the story’s recreation lies on the plain of its metrical structure. While it largely follows the matnawi by employing its equivalent, the Bengali meter of payar, other meters are used as well, most often the tripadi. In the first systematic probe into the semantic function of such a metrical system which is typical for many middle Bengali works, the alternation of different meters is linked with the alternation of the narrative modes of diegesis and mimesis. This excavation of important aspects of the aesthetics of production and reception considerably stands in contrast to judgments denying the middle Bengali Muslim works an aesthetic structure of their own and opens up comparative questions in different directions. It contributes to an overdue shift in the study of pre-colonial Muslim traditions in Bengal, from teleological paradigms of identity towards a literary history which asks the texts what they tell us about their recipients’ expectation and reception.