An Earthly Paradise

Political Practices, Commercial Enterprise, and Religious Traditions in Early Modern Bengal

Raziuddin Aquil 

This write-up is based on my coedited collection of essays, An Earthly Paradise: Trade, Politics and Culture in Early Modern Bengal. The study of history of Bengal tends to get enmeshed in and influenced by massive transformations which happened in the nineteenth century. In the process, the fascinating history of Bengal of the early modern era (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) is almost entirely overshadowed and neglected, whereas new research shows there is so much to know about Bengal in relation to what was happening in the Indian subcontinent and globally in this period. The essays in this volume highlight these complexities and connections.

These centuries witnessed the advent of many European merchants and travellers visiting Bengal to discover its abundance of riches – both natural resources and manufactured items of its enviable enterprise. By the end of the seventeenth century, they had come to the  firm conclusion, as an English East India Company employee and writer, Alexander Hamilton, did, that Bengal was an earthly paradise of a peculiar kind. Its reputation as the wealthiest province of the vast Mughal empire and an important centre in the global trading network of the early modern era attracted many to it.

The current volume points to significant strides made in the divergent  fields of Bengal’s early modern scholarship in the last two decades or so. Diverse themes in politics, trade and culture are covered using a wide variety of vernacular sources, besides returning to the conventional European Company archival material for fresh substantiation and validation.

Indeed, early modern Bengal bore witness to a plurality of developments in various spheres, which requires more discussion. The first five chapters in this volume, in particular, attempt to look at the diversity of Europeans coming into the region and their experiences as travellers and representatives of European companies, and the ways in which the latter negotiated with local society to establish themselves with varying degrees of success. Tilottama Mukherjee (Chapter 2) writes that a wide assortment of European travellers passed through Bengal and were motivated by various factors, especially corporate greed of European traders and companies.

Further, as Gargi Chattopadhyay has shown (Chapter 3), the Portuguese presence at nodal points along the Bhagirathi, including Sagor island, as well as the overshadowing presence of the Arakanese towards the east, contributed to the political turmoil of Bengal. One particular group of pirates known as the Magh or Rakhine marauders were especially feared for their daring raids enabled by an enviable ability to cover not only large parts of the littoral but also infiltrate the interior through inter-connected rivers and water channels, using lightly-made and swiftly-moving boats.  

The image of the contradictory character of a hell-like earthly paradise recurs in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European accounts of Bengal (as they do in the Mughal chronicles as well). They condemned it for being ruled by the mighty and greedy Muslim rulers, with its poor and slavish subjects, cunning money-grabbing traders, hot and oppressive climate, wild and untamed terrain, and yet with riches ready for plunder.

Much attention has been paid in scholarship and political discourse to the English East India Company because of the political power it would eventually gain to establish a truly colonial regime, something which the Portuguese and other Europeans could not do in Bengal. The boards of directors of other companies, such as the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), pretended that their only motive was commercial gain with no interest in territorial aggrandisement. Examining the goals of the VOC and its officials, as well as their relations with the Mughal authorities and local business partners in Bengal, Byapti Sur has illustrated (Chapter 4) how the Company officials in seventeenth-century Bengal sought to claim their moral authority through various strategies. 

Working through the General Imperial India Company (GIC) records in the Antwerp City archives, Wim De Winter has illustrated in detail the cultural difficulties and a number of tantalizing violations by the Company’s haughty representatives, which almost sunk its business interests. They survived for a time through local intervention before  fizzling out not long after (Chapter 5). The Nawab of Murshidabad, while allowing the GIC representatives to conduct their business, had observed that Europeans were not men of their word as they pretended to be. He expected them to understand the value of courtly ceremonials – whether it be elaborate greetings, taslimat or the offering of betel (paan) – before permissions and announcements regarding commercial transactions were made.

Indeed, officers working for other European Companies were more discreet in their utterances and activities, and succeeded because of their ability to adapt well to local conditions.  The French East India Company and its officers, for instance, worked in a functional organizational structure. Starting in 1664, under the direct authority of the French crown, its formal organization and management structure came to be established by the time that its base in Chandernagore was laid in 1693 through a farman issued by the Bengal Nawab. Sandip Munshi’s detailed discussion (Chapter 6) on the value of the organizational structure of the French East India Company shows that the central policy of the Company’s operation was determined by the Chamber of Directors in Paris, which was to be implemented by the Superior Council in Pondicherry for India operating through the Provincial Councils (as in Chandernagore in Bengal). The latter, in turn, supervised the subordinate factories under their command. As Munshi has shown, Chandernagore exploiting its geographical advantage with its proximity to the main political and commercial centres of Bengal – Hooghly, Kasimbazar, Malda and Murshidabad – and proper communication network, was able to make a sizeable profit during the period 1725-42 through its subordinate factories strategically located in Balasore, Kasimbazar, Patna, Dhaka and Jugdia.

Further, institutional corruption, as in the case of the English East India Company’s attempt to establish a monopoly on salt, severely affected the English commercial interests. Arijita Manna’s richly-detailed work (Chapter 8) has shown that the salt monopoly of the Company was a ‘doomed enterprise’. Institutional weaknesses, the persistence of local trading systems, resistance from indigenous communities and unclear boundaries of the early colonial state – despite serious attempts at boundary maintenance – together ensured that large-scale smuggling of salt continued through various trade-routes intersected by water bodies, channels and forests. The Marathas, Arakan rulers, French Company officials and local interested parties worked in connivance with corrupt English Company employees for ‘illicit’ trade in salt, produced and marketed through a network not controlled by the state.

Besides, as Sayako Kanda (Chapter 9) has analysed, the choice of a food item or any consumption material (in this case, salt) represented cultural, political and ritual values and, accordingly, shaped consumer preferences and the market. Price was important, and quality equally mattered. Salt was the second-largest source of revenue for the English Company; it attempted to control its production and supply to maintain high prices, which meant banning not only internal outputs but also importing a cheaper quality of salt from outside. The monopoly worked with some difficulty; the demand and supply of different varieties of salt – such as panga and karkatch – varied in different regions as per the taste of consumers. Some preferred the illegally-supplied, and low-priced karkatch to the costlier and refined salt sold in the market. 

Other commodities, such as raw silk, had a different trajectory. Competition from Indian merchants catering to the traditional Asian demand for raw silk meant that the Bengali peasants involved in its production had a better negotiating capacity and, hence, the English East India Company could not establish its monopoly on the silk trade. Roberto Davini (Chapter 11) has made an interesting comparison of the ambitious introduction of Piedmontese reeling technology to produce silk in two British colonies, Georgia and Bengal, during the period 1730-1830. The Georgia experiment was a big disaster as despite everything they did – recruiting and training mulberry cultivators, silkworm-rearers, spinners and reelers, and paying them high salaries – the labour force refused to work. The abundance of fertile land and the scarcity of human resources meant that the landowners were able to secure more profit from cultivating staple crops like rice and indigo by exploiting unskilled labour. In contrast, the Company state drastically altered the traditional Bengali reeling technology to increase the sales of raw silk through the introduction of the Piedmontese reeling machine for better control of the production process. From the point of view of the Company, the experiment was satisfactory for vast quantities of low-quality raw silk were produced between the 1770s and the 1830s. Yet as the quality of silk was low, the idea of producing high-quality Piedmontese silk at a low cost was defeated. 

The English East India Company state’s attempts to optimize profits in areas under its control through the introduction of several new policies had disastrous consequences for traditional economic arrangements, especially those involving the peasants. Amrita Sengupta has illustrated (Chapter 15) how certain parts of Bengal, especially between 1779 and 1800, witnessed severe upheavals, including an insurgency by the Dashnami Sannyasis and Madariya Faqirs in north Bengal, the Dhing peasant rebellion at Rangpore and the Chuar Adivasi disturbances in southern Bengal. The Company state not only resumed the rent-free land-grants that Sannyasi-Faqir institutions like the maths had enjoyed in several northern districts but also imposed curbs on their movement – pilgrimages and processions. These groups, which had access to considerable military resources created havoc in north Bengal for close to thirty years. The British succeeded, though not uniformly, in destroying the local-level political economy and culture in certain pockets by the late eighteenth century, which was resisted but without success.

The changes would be manifest not only in the late eighteenth-century political and economic sphere but in the cultural arena as well. This is captured in the portrayal or imaging in the eighteenth-century Murshidabad paintings. As Mrinalini Sil has shown (Chapter 7), the courts of the Murshidabad Nawabs were grand, displaying elaborate rituals with coded meanings, which were recorded in contemporary accounts and visually depicted in multiple paintings. The city of Murshidabad provided a platform for extraordinarily varied styles of art to emerge from the many inter-connected painting traditions of the eighteenth century. 

As politics changed from the Nizamat to the Company rule, noticeable changes were beginning to be felt in many aspects of life from the latter half of the eighteenth century. Natasha Eaton has presented (Chapter 16) a fine art-historical analysis of the ‘rubbishing’ of Hindu deities, using a concept significantly termed as ‘iconoclash’, that is, a position somewhere between iconophilia and iconophobia – involving the extraordinary career of Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart, on the one hand, and the iconoclastic London Missionary Society missionaries, on the other. As Eaton elucidates, ‘Unlike Company offcials who acquired Hindu images through theft, gift, prize or looting’, missionary collections ‘entailed rhetoric of legitimisation – a theory of rubbish and of extraction of the sacred from places they could not enter (shrines, temples, elite homes)’. Even as the missionaries could get some local allies in their antagonism to idolatry and the partial conversion and secularization of idols through their transfer to museums in London, the controversial idol chamber of Colonel Stuart, which housed a large collection of images of various deities accumulated over half a century with the Colonel rumoured to be a worshipper of idols, sabotaged the efforts of the evangelical missionaries. His Calcutta home was eventually taken over by the London Missionary Society and cleansed of the numerous ‘horrible’ idols. Eaton, however, notes how Stuart had the last laugh as his ‘will specified that the black basalt archway from a Shaiva Temple of the Pala period, a miniature temple, two statues of the river goddesses Ganga riding on a makara (crocodile) and Yamuna on a tortoise, a dome resembling the amalaka of an ancient Hindu temple and a lintel featuring the face of Shiva be incorporated into his colossal tomb at South Park Street, Calcutta’, thus violating a Christian and deistic space with his idolatrous proclivities.

Though the Company sepoys and officials were able to neutralize cultic figures, there was confusion and a lack of clarity over such matters involving popular religious beliefs, and when they sought to intervene, they usually messed it up. The indigenous society had accommodated many local deities in Brahmanical religious rituals. The Mangalkavya texts, composed between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, had made sense of popular religiosity, especially around the goddesses. Swarnali Biswas’ study (Chapter 13) refers to three well-known compositions – Manasamangal, Chandimangal and Dharmamangal – and attempts to see how women, both divine and human, were depicted in them. The narratives accord considerable power to goddesses such as Manasa and Chandi but, eventually, they are shown to be subordinated and domesticated by a male authority, such as the powerful male gods of the Hindu pantheon – for instance, Shiva as Manasa’s father and Chandi’s consort.

Since these are vernacular literary compositions of a religious or mythical nature, how do we deal with questions of corroboration with conventional sources used by previous generations of historians? A number of historians working on religious practices and historical traditions in medieval and early modern India have shown the way. The vernacular archive does provide considerable information on religious practices. In his study of accounts sheets, referred to as ‘books of religion’, Samuel Wright (Chapter 10) relies almost entirely on this ‘regional archive’ to unravel complex practices of consumption among households and institutions organizing religious activities in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bengal. The activities were varied and included pujas, household ceremonies, installations of idols and inauguration of monasteries. As Wright notes, the movement of goods and people depended upon multiple networks operating simultaneously. The accounts of expenses borne under different heads – from payments to Brahmins and helpers to specific amounts spent on things supplied with labour charges – were maintained in exact terms down to the last penny. The history of these practices in all their precision can be traced from, at least, the seventeenth century. 

Further, as Ananya Roy Choudhury has shown in her article (Chapter 14) on the early years of institutionalization of Bengali Vaishnavism, Hindu mobilization maintained an ambiguity on caste or jati-based hierarchy. Indeed, resisting Islam’s dominant presence, Chaitanya identified Kaliyuga as the time when Brahmins would behave like Muslims. Accounts also refer to the confrontation of Chaitanya and his followers with a qazi and their subsequent reconciliation. Chaitanya and a group of Vaishnavas confronted a Muslim qazi who wanted to stop the kirtana and other Vaishnava religious gatherings.

The Sufi approach, in such contexts, was different, eclectic and pluralist, though located within the broader Islamic traditions. In the cosmopolitan background of seventeenth-century Arakan, ruled by the Buddhist dynasty of Marak U and boasting of a multilingual culture connected with the Indian Ocean network, the seventeenth-century Qadiri Sufi poet, Alaol, showed the way through his interesting strategy of diffusing several important Islamic cultural texts into the Bengali environment. Anwesha Sengupta’s rich discussion (Chapter 12) of Alaol’s Bengali rendering of the Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jaisi’s famous Hindi premakhayan, Padmavat, written a century earlier, shows the interesting ways in which the poet dealt with the problem of translation. An attempt at a mere literal translation of a complex text could have been a meaningless exercise and departing entirely from it would not have done justice to the original. Hence, as Sengupta has shown through her close comparison of the prologue of the two versions, the original Hindi and its Bengali adaptation, Alaol’s translation is not only a sincere reflection of the original text but also an in-depth interpretation, which he was able to achieve through an attempt at understanding the inner dynamics of the text. This was an important exercise as part of the effort to explain the complex Perso-Arabic Islamic discourse in the Bengali vernacular through the significant deployment of equivalent terms and phrases from the Sufi-Bhakti milieu of the period.

Some  fine studies on Sufism in medieval and early modern India have come up in recent decades, but Bengali Sufism is still attracting some historians to unpack a whole gamut of themes and issues involving Sufi activities from as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century. Some interesting works have come up from time to time, yet some pressing questions related to Sufis’ political and cultural roles, such as their involvement in the diffusion and expansion of Islam, require more in-depth discussions. The Chishti Sufis of the Bengal Sultanate carried forward the traditions and practices adopted by their predecessors in Delhi, though important  figures like Shaikh Akhi Siraj-ud-Din (d. 1357) and his successor (khalifa) in the Chishti lineage, Shaikh ‘Ala-ul-Haq (d. 1398) did not maintain a critical distance from the political regime. Subsequently, ‘Ala-ul-Haq’s khalifas, Syed Ashraf Jahangir Simnani (d. 1405) and Shaikh Nur Qutb-i-‘Alam (d. 1415), are known to have played an active role in politics, influencing the sultans of Jaunpur and Bengal, respectively. They are particularly remembered for their efforts to ‘save’ Islam from the sedition (fasad) of the mighty Hindu zamindar, Raja Ganesh, who had captured power to declare himself as the sultan in his own right. Even though the raja would have made friendly gestures towards the custodians of Islam, his name could not have been read in the khutba, or sermons, in the mosque. They resorted to an interesting way out of the crisis, with the Raja's son formally embracing Islam and styling as Sultan Jalal-ud-Din bin Raja Ganesh.

There is a need to explore some of the key issues relating to the emergence of Islam in Bengal and to understand the processes in the making of such a huge Bengali-speaking Muslim population.  The early inroads of the Turkish conquerors in the thirteenth century, establishment of the Bengal Sultanate, arrival of the Sufis and their complex negotiations with the existing religious traditions, integration of Bengal as a Mughal suba or province, slow and gradual process of cultural accretion and Islamization, the question of identity formation, linguistic and religious attachments, and more recent issues of communal antagonism and neo-Islamic assertions require careful investigation.

Using a wide array of sources, the contributors of this volume, coming from diverse academic affiliations, and including several young researchers, have attempted to address historiographical shortcomings by deploying new material and offering fresh interpretations. Early modern Bengal’s history does get overshadowed by later developments of the nineteenth century. What these assortments of articles highlight is that this period needs to be studied afresh.

To conclude with P.J. Marshall's endorsement in his Foreword to the book: "What this volume clearly demonstrates is that the early modern history of Bengal is now studied by a much wider range of people from a much greater diversity of institutions throughout the world than was the case in the 1960s. It, therefore, reflects trends that are general among the global historical community. The great political and economic narratives of subjection and impoverishment are presumably taken for granted. They have given way to a mass of highly suggestive insights into the trade, politics and culture of Bengal, which show that whatever the outside pressures may have been, the Bengali people made their own history. This rich collection leaves no doubt that the historiography of Bengal is currently in very capable hands".

Based on Raziuddin Aquil and Tilottama Mukherjee, eds, An Earthly Paradise: Trade, Politics and Culture in Early Modern Bengal, with a Foreword by P.J. Marshall, New Delhi: Manohar Books, 2020.