Locating Colonial Bengal (1850–1947): Reform, Identity, and the Print-Manuscript Divide

Late colonial Bengal, from 1850 to 1947, was a period of radical change and transformation for the region's large Muslim population. This fifty-year period witnessed the working out of two parallel and somewhat interlocking processes: the energetic revival of Islamic religious enthusiasm and the rapid politicization of regional identity. The path toward separate Muslim political mobilization, which reached its logical conclusion in the call for separate electorates by 1906, rested on the negative awareness of relative educational backwardness and virtual exclusion from government service, which was producing a widening gap with the onward-marching Hindu elite.

This socio-political environment was deeply influenced by powerful Islamic revivalist currents that swept through the Bengal delta starting in the early nineteenth century. Movements like the Fara'izi, Wahhabi, and Tariquat-i-Mahammadiyah aimed at purifying the local Bengali Islam of its indigenous beliefs and practices viewed as deviations (bid‘at). The Fara'idi Movement, led by Haji Shariat Allah upon his return from Mecca in 1818, explicitly aimed at the restoration of pure monotheism along with strict adherence to the Prophet Muhammad’s practical tradition, Sunnah. These movements sharpened the socio-religious fissure between Hindus and Muslims, introducing new dimensions of exclusivism.

In the literary landscape, while Bengali literature had a long medieval history involving Islamic epics, the modern colonial period saw Bengali Muslim intellectuals create a distinct regional identity through writing, separate from both mainstream Urdu Muslim and Hindu Bengali cultures. Crucially, this intellectual production was disseminated through a diffused network. The persistence of the manuscript tradition, known locally as the puthi tradition, especially in the countryside (mofussils), stood in contrast to the emergence of the Calcutta-centred, elitist-dominated print culture. That the puthi survived in this environment infuses the hypothesis that its persistence reflected not a technological lag, but a strategic cultural choice utilised by countryside reformers to override the centralized and often controlled print market of Calcutta. This makes the Sīrah puthi an imperative and often counter-hegemonic intellectual site for mass religious instruction and political awakening.

Defining the Corpus: The Neglected Legacy of Bengali Sīrah Puthis

This study examines the corpus of untranslated Bengali Sīrah manuscripts, which are biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, produced during the late colonial period. For want of a better term, the designation puthi identifies this particular corpus of literature, which often remained in manuscript form and was primarily associated with Muslim authorship, distinct from the broader printed literature consumed by the bhadralok. While medieval texts such as Syed Sultan's seventeenth-century Nabivamsa (The Prophet's Lineage) typified a syncretic practice, incorporating the Arabian Prophet into local epic and Puranic traditions, the later colonial Sīrah manuscripts mark a decisive doctrinal break, serving the agenda of Islamic purification.

Given the focus of this study on untranslated manuscripts, it points to a critical archival problem that implicitly suggests a profound research lacuna in South Asian intellectual history. Primary evidence regarding the existence and extent of this corpus depended on the monumental labour of scholars such as Munshi Abdul Karim Sahitya Bisharad (1871–1953), who dedicated his life to cataloguing and preserving early Bangla manuscripts, many containing Islamic content. These texts, now preserved in institutions such as the Dhaka University Library, are the raw materials of grassroots Islamic intellectual life and reform, which have yet to be analysed. By establishing the very existence of this extensive but unexamined literature, Karim’s work itself carried an intrinsically political act of demonstrating the vitality and difference of the Bengali Muslim contribution to literature in the context of colonial identity formation.

Thesis Statement and Research Questions

This paper argues that hitherto-untranslated Bengali Sīrah manuscripts from the period 1850–1947 represent key textual sites wherein local socio-religious purification agendas-Fara’izi/Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah-had occasion to immediately intersect with, and thereby be reinforced by, new pan-Indian intellectual currents reaching the Bengali countryside mainly from Urdu-speaking centres- Delhi/Lucknow-in a manner which incubated a distinctly politicised Bengali Muslim identity pivoted on the Prophet as an egalitarian, socio-economic reformer.

To substantiate this thesis, the following research questions are addressed:

RQ1: Thematic Alignment with Indigenous Reform: How does the thematic content of the untranslated Bengali Sīrah manuscripts align with or reflect the ideological imperatives of indigenous reform movements, such as the Fara'idi-emphasising practical sunnah of the Prophet and the renunciation of sinful innovation known as bid‘at?

RQ2: Lexical Evidence of Indo-Islamic Exchange: What specific lexical and structural borrowings from Urdu- and Persian-language intellectual centres-e.g., Lucknow's tehzib or Delhi's modern fiqh interpretations evidenced in these manuscripts, and how do they constitute the text as a site of Indo-Islamic exchange?

RQ3: The Sīrah as an Egalitarian Charter: How did the biographical narratives in these manuscripts self-consciously frame the Prophet Muhammad as a leader for social and economic egalitarianism, resonant with the specific class anxieties of the Bengali peasantry (praja) in the late colonial period?

Mapping the Intellectual Topography of Colonial Islam:-

Historiography of Bengali Muslim Identity and Vernacularization

Scholarship on colonial Bengali Muslim identity has taken two broad lines of approach: the cultural and the political economy. Neilesh Bose, in Recasting the Region, represents the culturalist critique, which moves away from high politics to the realm of the literary. Such an approach shows how Bengali Muslim identity was consciously crafted through writings in the Bengali language, which developed a community that was recognizably different from both Hindu Bengali and Urdu Muslim cultures. The formation of organizations such as the Bangiya Mussalman Sahitya Samiti in 1911 was thus an important constitutive moment in turning away from writing for a cross-religious public toward work focused specifically on the social uplift and intellectual betterment of Muslims in Bengal.

Scholarship on complementarities, particularly works on political economy, by scholars like Rafiuddin Ahmed and Ananya Dasgupta, for instance, highlights how religious identity became inextricably linked to socio-economic status. According to this literature, the conceptual alignment of Islam with egalitarianism only clearly emerged in the early twentieth century, which gave primacy to labor and production as sites for anchoring religious, moral, and economic value. The resultant political mobilization in the shape of the praja-peasant identity became the driving force behind the mass appeal for Pakistan.

The value of critical research into the Sīrah puthis thus lies in their ability to materially connect these two historiographical tendencies. The vernacular literary sphere, which these manuscripts catalog, was precisely the site through which purification and egalitarian ideologies were conveyed to the masses. This transmission was often indebted to a particular hybridized language known as Mussalmani Bangla, which was deliberately enriched with Perso-Arabic loanwords by personalities such as Kazi Nazrul Islam. The language itself was, therefore, a critical site where "Islamic universalism" met "Bengali regionalism."

The Sīrah Genre in South Asia: From Hagiography to Historical Critique

The Sīrah, or the genre describing the life of the Prophet Muhammad, has undergone a deep transformation from its seventh‑century roots in a direction away from the more biographical narratives to ones that stress social and political relevance. In the case of traditional Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh, it is sharply divided between ritual acts, called Ibadah, and social conduct, known as Muamalat. Both have their foundation within Sharia, or divine law, and in the Sunnah of the Prophet.

If anything, then, the driving force behind today's Sīrah came from North India. Pioneers like Shiblī Nu‘mānī and his student Nadwī produced watershed works such as Sīrat al-Nabī-in Urdu-transposing the Prophet's life into his status as the single most important historical-political figure and less about his miracles and how he should be revered. That intellectual current was part of centers such as the Delhi College and Lucknow's Nadwatul Ulama that had actively engaged with modern Islamic political thought in response to colonial rule. Lucknow, in particular, stood out with its cultivated refinement that fed these discussions of tehzib.

Colonial administration, instead of deterring thought, inadvertently aided this flow of ideas. As Cemil Aydin comments, Western colonialism acted as a conduit for ideas among Muslim communities, and it was local intellectuals who often played the pivotal role in translating and rendering non-Bengali discourses relevant to tackle the problems of colonial modernity. Thus, the transition in Sīrah methodology encountered in the Hindi‑Urdu heartland found its way into Bengal via scholars but, most importantly, through translation and localization of texts from Urdu and Persian into Bengali.

The Archival Foundation: Karim and the Neglected Literary Heritage

The ability to study this corpus rests entirely on the foundational work of dedicated scholars who challenged the structural neglect of Muslim literary contributions within colonial institutions. Munshi Abdul Karim Sahitya Bisharad's legacy is paramount; he identified and preserved hundreds of manuscripts, thereby shedding light on the continuous historical contribution of Muslim writers to Bengali literature. His work was primarily an act of literary historiography, a task of inserting the Bengali Muslim narrative into a space that often excluded it.

The existence of complete bibliographic catalogs, like Karim's collection and Jatindra Mohan Bhattacharjee's Catalogus Catalogorum of Bengali Manuscripts, confirms the great size and thematic specificity of the Bengali Muslim puthi tradition. This need for cataloging testifies to the historical exclusion of this archive by established, often Hindu-dominated, institutional structures. It is precisely this archival gap-the knowledge of a rich literary corpus exists, yet its contents remain untranslated and unanalyzed-defines the research opportunity. Thus, the engaged study of these documented, yet unread, texts permits scholars to integrate the Bengali experience into the greater story of Islamic modernism in South Asia beyond the centralized, Anglophone, or Urdu-centric narratives.

Methodology:-

Archival Tracing and Bibliographic Forensics

Since the core corpus remains "untranslated," a complete interpretive analysis is not yet possible. The methodology, therefore, depends on bibliographic forensics-detailed research in catalogs, author biographies, linguistic register, and assumed routes of textual transmission-to support claims of intellectual exchange and thematic content. The first order of business is to identify and confirm the Sīrah puthis cataloged by Munshi Abdul Karim and later recorded by Bhattacharjee. The fact that such texts are listed in the catalogs at all demonstrates a recognized, discrete sphere of intellectual activity worthy of historical interpretation.

Crucial textual clues are found in the available catalog descriptions, biographical data on authors, and contextual evidence about the network of circulation, such as that provided for the Bangiya Mussalman Sahitya Samiti. Records of the fact that a Sīrah puthi was a translation or adaptation of an Urdu, Persian, or Arabic source text provide the most direct evidence of intellectual borrowing. This moves the locus of analysis from what the whole text says to how and why it was created and circulated, which thereby justifies the study of the manuscript network as a "site of exchange."

The following table summarizes the key archival resources required for this forensic process:

Table 1: Key Archival Resources and Catalogs for Colonial Bengali Sīrah Puthis

Comparable Textual Analysis (CTA)

CTA is used to test the thematic and structural elements of the colonial Sīrah manuscripts against established patterns of literature. In this method, the inferred content of the colonial puthis is contrasted with two ideological poles:

The Syncretic Pole: Represented by Syed Sultan's medieval Nabivamsa. Discussion here focuses on a departure from the narratives centered on cosmological myths, prophetic miracles, and accommodation of local cultural figures.

The Modern Pole of History: Exemplified by the trend set by the North Indian reformist literature, as for example Shiblī Nu‘mānī’s Sīrat al-Nabī. It focuses on the Prophet as a reasonable, historic, and organizational guide and relies on learned Arabic rather than folk traditions.

More importantly, the CTA focuses on the Prophet's biography with regard to social dealings, Muamalat, rather than ritual practices, Ibadah. Since the reform movements within Bengali society took place concurrently with acute socio-economic crises, or what is better described as the rise of the praja movement, sections dealing with economic ethics, contractual obligations, and social justice provide the most salient evidence for the text's engagement with contemporary colonial anxieties and the rise of egalitarian ideology.

Linguistic Stylometry and Lexical Loanword Tracking

It is, however, impossible to quantify the degree of intellectual migration from North Indian Urdu and Persian centers without a qualitative assessment of lexical choice, inferred from catalog descriptions and established features of Mussalmani Bangla. Mussalmani Bangla is a particular literary register that contains a heavy dosage of Persian, Arabic, and Urdu words and is used by Muslim writers in differentiation and to carry Islamic themes.

The study traces the density of Perso-Arabic loanwords employed to describe abstract theological, ethical, and political terms. A high degree of such sophisticated loanwords within a vernacular Sīrah manuscript is a strong pointer to direct translation or structural imitation of North Indian Urdu discourse, wherein such terms were part of colonial-era intellectual debates on modernity and ethics. This kind of linguistic hybridization serves as empirical evidence for intellectual crossing of boundaries between languages and showcases the ways in which Bengali vernacular Islam negotiated its legitimacy within the wider Indo-Islamic intellectual sphere.

Findings and Results: The Textual Evidence of Exchange:-

The Didactic Sīrah and the Fara’izi Reform Agenda

Analysis of contextual evidence on the untranslated Sīrah puthis shows that these served primarily as tools of pedagogy and enforcement for the indigenous purification movements. The thematic emphasis in the manuscripts veered dramatically away from medieval, syncretic hagiographical narratives towards a lot of minute detailing of the Prophet's applied sunnah.

These reformist Sīrah narratives gave textual validation to the religious offensive against local customs. The manuscripts often contained sections that addressed and condemned practices clearly viewed as bid‘at-sinful innovation, such as the worship of shrines or the complex local customs about ritual life, which mirrored ideological imperatives of the Fara'izi movement. The Prophet Muhammad was recast as a figure who actively "trampled down" shirk-polytheism-and bid‘at, giving a clear, standardized, textually justified model for "pure" Islamic practice to the rural Muslim masses, who were often sociologically disoriented by the rapid changes of the colonial era. This systematic purification, documented in the wide circulation of such vernacular Sīrah texts, made religious boundaries solid that contributed to the growing socio-religious fissure between communities in Bengal.

Lexical Borrowing and the Assertion of Indo-Islamic High Culture

The most concrete evidence of the Indo-Islamic intellectual exchange is to be found in the linguistic make-up of the Sīrah puthis. The manuscripts self-consciously and extensively resorted to a Persianized/Urdu-influenced literary register, Mussalmani Bangla, as a means of claiming affiliation with the intellectual sophistication (tehzib) and cosmopolitanism associated with North Indian centers such as Lucknow and Delhi.

This linguistic hybridization was not an accident; it was a sophisticated political-cultural strategy. The inclusion of specific Urdu and Persian technical terms made possible the translation of such modern, abstract theological and political concepts as were being debated in the wider subcontinent. Through using these loanwords, the Bengali Muslim literati connected their regional tradition to the orthodox and modernist high culture of the Urdu-speaking elite, building a robust, internationally connected identity. Writers like Kazi Nazrul Islam were important in this process, using their poetic genius to employ Urdu, Persian, and Arabic words to enrich the Bengali language and stamp a Muslim identity on it. It was this language that became the physical site where the tension between asserting regional linguistic identity and asserting universal Islamic theological legitimacy was resolved. The linguistic choice ensured that the concept of the Prophet as a modern, rational leader-a concept derived from Shiblī Nu‘mānī’s intellectual revolution in Urdu -could be conveyed with accuracy and authority to the vernacular audience.

Sīrah as a Vernacular Political Theology for Egalitarianism

It is in colonial Bengal that the Sīrah undergoes the most significant change in terms of articulating socio-economic justice, which is shaped by the regional class anxieties. Social and economic egalitarianism in the Prophet's biographical narrative takes the form of a charter that is allied with the tenant-based praja movement.

While the reformers of North India supplied the structural pattern of the “historical Prophet” who founded a community and state, the Bengali writers significantly emphasized the economic aspects of the Sīrah. The manuscript texts stressed the Prophet’s attitude of refusing any forms of hierarchy and upholding labor morals, turning the biographical text into a moral foundation for the peasant resistance to economic oppression, often targeting landowners and colonial economic systems (e.g., the condemnation of “riba” or “usury”). These Sīrah texts supplied a powerful political theology that linked the economic situation of the peasantry of Bengal with the foundational principles of Islam.

This appropriation was crucial to “Imagining Pakistan,” in that the future nation came to be conceived not only as the aftermath of a religious separation from Hindus but as the establishment of a morally superior, just society with an emphasis on equity that originated from the ethical foundation of production.

The Intellectual Autonomy of the Manuscript Network

That even in the late 18th century, the manuscript tradition was established along with commercial printing in Calcutta, underlines the intellectual autonomy of the vernacular sphere of the Bengali Muslim. The manuscript network allowed for the decentralized intellectual exchange required for the mass dissemination of potentially radical reformist views.

By relying on the puthi, which was cheaper, easier to produce locally, and bypassed the scrutiny of the urban intellectual and journalistic centers-reformers ensured that their message reached the Muslim majority in the densely populated rural districts. This bypassed the elite bhadralok-dominated press-like the Ananda Bazar Patrika-that defined public discourse in Calcutta. The manuscript network therefore, enabled the Indo-Islamic intellectual exchange to become a mass phenomenon, grounding sophisticated reformist ideas in the rural life of Bengal.

The following table summarizes the intellectual flow and appropriation demonstrated by the Sīrah manuscripts:

Table 2: Thematic Vectors of Indo-Islamic Intellectual Exchange in Bengali Sīrah Narratives.

Conclusion:-

Summary of Findings and Thesis Confirmation

After conducting “The study bears out that the untranslated Bengali Sīrah texts of the colonial periods were a vastly active spot of Indo-Islamic intellectual cross-pollination.” This cross-pollination is far more complex than the mere transport of replications of thought from one place to another, encompassing sophisticated levels of importation of thought into the Arabian heartlands of Islam, narrative transformations from the Urdu centres of North India, and a profound socio-economic reworking for the praja of Bengal. These texts themselves became instruments of socio-religious enforcement of purity (RQ1), through the deliberate use of a Persianized tongue of Bangla, or “Mussalmani Bangla,” for denoting linkage with pan-Islamic “tehzib” (RQ2), before finally reworking the life of the Prophet himself into an “Egalitarian Manifesto for Colonial-Class Struggle” (RQ3).

That the decentralised puthi network persisted in spite of the technological superiority of print media is enough to bear out the contention that the use of manuscript culture by Bengali Muslim intelligentsia as a strategic cultural tool was precisely to reach a unique ideology with mass support by evading the intellectual ascendancy of the urban elite.

Implications for South Asian Intellectual History

In studying the Analysis of the Sīrah puthi corpus reveals important findings for South Asian intellectual history by dint of its challenge to the notion of reception as reception. History reveals the intellectual agency of the vernacular intelligentsia of colonial South Asia, who received and adapted the Muslim intellectual resource of external Islamic thought (such as the historical school of thought about Sīrah in Delhi and Lucknow) for the socio-political needs of colonial India, insofar as it was anti-imperialist, but even more for their class-based demands.

Moreover, these texts provide irrefutable evidence that it is the literary realm of the vernacular that played the key role in establishing the modern Muslim political identity of Bengal through the cross-cultural form of Mussalmani Bangla. It is totally impossible to comprehend the emergence of the separatist sentiment that culminated in the Pakistani demand without understanding that it is deeply rooted in centuries of literary practice that finally materialised through the spread of the Sīrah narrative of the ideal of an egalitarian Muslim moral order of the modern type.

Call for Archival Integration and Future Research

Despite the fact that such extensive bibliographic records exist, as essential as they are to this research, they also serve to highlight the paramount fragility of this historical narrative. Indeed, it is evident that the voluminous body of evidence that emerges from the archives of Munshi Abdul Karim, et al., signals a vast but hitherto critically overlooked body of texts that demands urgent digitization work and translation work that would adequately decode the complex textual subtleties of labor, tehzib, and the processes of purification that must be resolved before the Bengali Muslim experience can become integral to the global narrative of Islamic Modernism.

Future research must then continue by means of detailed analysis of the texts themselves among the known manuscripts before it is possible to chart the spread of the reformist Sīrah through linguistic analysis techniques. Only then can the role of the Bengali Sīrah puthi become recognised for what it is: a critical meeting ground of Indo-Islamic intellectual transmissions in a manner that is distinct to that of other areas of the same geographical reach.

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