Literature reflects the society in which it arises, and Bengali literature is no exception to this reality, as David L. Curley in Poetry and History: Bengali Maṅgal-kābya and Social Change in Precolonial Bengal, emphasizes through his analysis of maṅgal-kābya, a genre of Bengali literature, asserting the significance of writing history based on such a genre without desecrating the characters. This volume, a collection of essays, illustrates the power and role of poetry within the precolonial context of Bengal and discusses how poetry as performance portrays the social history of the time. Curley's collection of essays seeks answers to three pertinent questions about how historians should read the maṅgal-kābya of Bengal: How can historians read maṅgal-kābya in a way appropriate to their character as literature, and still find a use for them in writing history? How can a historian define and investigate the circumstances of composition and performance? How should a historian think about changes in the genre as a whole during the period of its composition?
Curley's study aims to guide his readers from a romanticized understanding of Caṇḍīmaṅgal, the sixteenth-century Bengali text by Mukunda, a maṅgal-kābya text, to a critical understanding of this genre, which sheds light on history. He defines maṅgal-kābya and argues that Caṇḍīmaṅgal includes narrative structures, which can be classified as metaphoric and metonymic. Much of this study corroborates the existing rich literature on history, literature, and religion, and furthers the significance of a thorough understanding of maṅgal-kābya for the purpose of writing history.
Curley has organized his book into seven chapters, which deal with different aspects of history through an analysis of Mukunda's Caṇḍīmaṅgal and demonstrate how historians could benefit from such an engagement. After defining maṅgal-kābya as a genre in Bengali literature and a trope of his analysis, the first chapter, “A Historian's Introduction to Reading Maṅgal-kābya,” is devoted to the methods that will prove beneficial for historians reading Caṇḍīmaṅgal, a maṅgal-kābya on which the entire book is based.
Chapter 2, “Kings and Commerce on an Agrarian Frontier: Kālketu's Story in Mukunda's Caṇḍīmaṅgal,” examines Caṇḍīmaṅgal in which one can understand various aspects of kingship related to the expansion of peasant agriculture in the northern and western regions of Bengal and its connection to commercialization in the precolonial period of Bengal. Here, Curley argues that labor markets and the process of commercialization to some extent paved the way for state formation on the agrarian front. With the preservation of both “buying and selling” and “hunting,” Mukunda developed the idea of the king submissive to norms of exchange.
Chapter 3, “Marriage, Honor, Agency, and Trials by Ordeal: Women's Gender Roles in Caṇḍīmaṅgal,” discusses women's gender roles as they were imagined and discussed in Caṇḍīmaṅgal. He approaches Caṇḍīmaṅgal to understand how gender roles were constituted, rather than the nature of gender roles, on which previous scholarship focused. This chapter argues that Caṇḍīmaṅgal did not constitute gender by means of binary opposite and mutually exclusive terms; rather, the text imagines masculine and feminine gender roles as multiple and ranked within each gender.
Chapter 4, “‘Tribute Exchange’ and the Liminality of Foreign Merchants in Mukunda's Caṇḍīmaṅgal,” discusses the liminality of Hindu merchants of the Bengali Gandhabanik jati and highlights problems involved in “tribute exchange,” where receiving goods of greater value meant receiving greater honor, which questioned the hierarchy of relations between merchants and rulers.
Chapter 5, “‘Voluntary’ Relationships and Royal Gifts of Pān in Mughal Bengal” investigates pān, Piper betel, as a symbolic representation of exchange through which a ruler and his subjects could enact political relations. In Caṇḍīmaṅgal, the acceptance of a gift of pān meant entering into an enduring relationship between subject and ruler or among commoners. The context gave meaning to receiving pān as it was valued, on one hand, while on the other, it transcended royal boundaries.
Chapter 6, “Mahārājā Kṛṣṇacandra, Hinduism, and Kingship in the Contact Zone of Bengal,” explores the relationship between Nadīyā rulers and the nawab of Bengal during the mid-eighteenth century with the help of art and family histories to understand their self-representations. He argues that during the mid-eighteenth century, Raja Kṛṣṇacandra (1710–82) constructed a unitary and inclusive meaning for “Hinduism” to support his sovereignty because they could not create an independent kingdom themselves.
Chapter 7, “Lost Meanings and New Stories: Caṇḍīmaṅgal after British Dominance,” discusses changes in the Caṇḍīmaṅgal texts toward the end of their production and reexamines human agency related to the challenges of British rule. Curley maintains that after the commencement of British dominance, textual production of maṅgal-kabya remained engaged with both devotional and this-worldly issues by ingeniously creating new stories based on contemporary issues of the society.
Poetry and History: Bengali Maṅgal-kābya and Social Change in Precolonial Bengal contains original research, but as a collection of essays, each individual chapter could serve as useful resource for teaching different issues in precolonial Bengal and the use of maṅgal-kābya. As such, it will be of interest to historians of India as well as to scholars of religion and literature. Finally, as Curley suggested the study forces us to consider the significance of maṅgal-kābya of Bengal and such literary genres in any vernacular traditions engaging in social discourse and to continue such engagement through new stories based on contemporary time through poetry.
