Remapping Muslim literary culture: folklore, Bulbul, and world-making in late colonial Bengal

Abstract

Bengali Muslim literary culture comprises a conspicuously under-researched domain of colonial Indian history. That Muslims formed the majority of Bengal’s population by the early twentieth century has been recognized in a variety of sources, but the comprehension of this fact within the cultural and literary histories of colonial India has eluded modern historians. Late colonial Bengal saw the rise of a Muslim literary culture that included intense engagements with Hindus, Muslims of other parts of India, and Urdu linguistic and cultural references. These engagements, detailed in this article, include the rise of folklore collection, the creation of a new literary criticism, and critical engagement with pan-Indian Muslim thought in the 1930s. A visible forum for this engagement was the journal Bulbul (Nightingale), a 1930s magazine that showcased a specifically Bengali Muslim language, literature, and culture that would draw from both Hindu and Muslim elements and aim to situate Bengali Muslim writing and thought into a ‘world-making literature’. In line with recent developments in global intellectual history, this essay argues that Bengali Muslim writers and critics of the inter-war period cultivated ‘world-making’ practices that sought not to create a separate Muslim nation, but to integrate Bengali Muslim writing into a ‘world literature’.