The Ocean of Love: Middle Bengali Sufi Literature and the Fakirs of Bengal.

• Author: Salomon, Carol
• Position: Review

By DAVID CASHIN. Skrifter utgivna av Foreningen for Orientaliska Studier, no. 17. Stockholm: ASSOCIATION OF ORIENTAL STUDIES, STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY, 1995. Pp. 329. SK 10.

The Islam of Bengal, which has the second largest Muslim population in the world - concentrated mainly in the eastern delta comprising present-day Bangladesh - is characterized by flexibility, adaptability, and accommodation to local traditions. The book under review, which was the author's Stockholm University dissertation, is a study of Bengali Sufi esoteric literature dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This highly abstruse literature, composed by some of the most distinguished authors of medieval Bengal, including the late-sixteenth-century epic poet Saiyid Sultan, was influenced by the beliefs and practices of Bengali Tantric yogic traditions. To my knowledge, this is only the second book-length study of the literature (not including discussions in text editions) published to date, following Ashim Roy's The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

Cashin's aim in writing this book is to demonstrate that (pp. 111-12) "the majority of these texts hold a specific cultic line which is directly traceable to one or another of the Hindu cults." He rejects Muhammad Animul Haq's and Ahmad Sharif's view of Bengali Sufi literature as the product of a combination of influences, including Vedantic, Tantric, Nath, Vaisnava Sahajiya, Sufi, and Buddhist. He also rejects Ashim Roy's assessment that Muslim authors derived their Tantric and yogic ideas largely from the Naths, arguing that Roy had only part of the picture (p. 40). Instead, he sets out to prove that the texts can be divided into two distinct and for the most part exclusive groups, according to whether they are Nath in orientation or Vaisnava Sahajiya - the former texts predating the latter but virtually disappearing by the nineteenth century.

According to Cashin, his method differs from that of previous scholars in that he does not merely discuss isolated terms, but rather provides the contexts in which they occur, including detailed textual analysis, since technical terminology tends not only to be recycled but also often reinterpreted. In cases where a term has both Nath and Vaisnava Sahajiya antecedents, he first determines the distinctive sense in which it is used in each tradition in order to be able to trace the source of the word used in the Sufi text. He combined his study of texts with fieldwork in Bangladesh. At the beginning of several chapters he quotes from a Sufi song he collected, or from an interview he conducted with a pir, in order to show continuity between the medieval textual tradition and modem Sufi belief and practice, in which he finds Vaisnava Sahajiya to be the predominant "cultic" influence.

For this study Cashin examined numerous manuscripts and published texts. He translates here for the first time four short works into English, namely Nur Nama, by Sekh Paran; Cari Mokamer Bhed, by Abdul Hakim; Har Gauri Sambad, by Sekh Canda;(1) and Satyanarayaner Puthi, by Ballabha, and appends their texts in roman transliteration at the end of the chapters in which they are translated and analyzed. This is also the first time that Sekh Paran's and Abdul Hakim's Bengali texts have appeared in print. In support of his arguments, Cashin includes translated portions of several other works as well. In addition, in the course of his discussions, he quotes from Nath and Vaisnava Sahajiya literature to serve as a basis for comparison with the Sufi literature.

The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter two, "The Sahajiya-Nath-Sufi Confluence in Bengal," discusses the factors which led to the emergence of a large Bengali Muslim population and also gives an overview of Bengali Tantric traditions. Chapter three, "In the Beginning . . .," compares creation myths in Bengali Sufi texts with those in Bengali Nath and Vaisnava Sahajiya works. In chapter four, "Yogic Texts," Cashin translates and interprets Abdul Hakim's Cari Mokamer Bred, which, along with Saiyid Murtaza's Yoga Kalandar, is one of the two Sufi texts he found that deals primarily...