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The global translinguistics of Bengali Muslims
- Author(s):
- Shakil Rabbi (see profile)
- Date:
- 2022
- Group(s):
- LSL Language and Society, TC Postcolonial Studies
- Subject(s):
- Folklore, Conversion, South Asia, Literary form, Islam, Language and languages, Bengali literature, Popular culture--Study and teaching
- Item Type:
- Book chapter
- Permanent URL:
- https://doi.org/10.17613/anzp-4k68
- Abstract:
- This chapter presents a discussion of a literary genre called puthis, a premodern tradition of religious stories and plays in what is now Bangladesh, as an example of vernacular cosmopolitanism in an Asian context. The language of this genre, called Dubasha, is a “mixed language mode” (Seely 2008) characterized by the replacement of Sanskrit vocabulary – tatsamas – with Persian and Arabic. Such replacement creates heteroglossic utterances indexing its Islamic character and popularizing purpose. Sanskrit lexicon and the tatsama register are eschewed in the genre, I argue, because of rhetorical and religious reasons even though they represent the sadhu bhasa – the literate register – associated with local literary tradition. The heteroglossic feature of this genre functions to constitute the umma – the Islamic community of believers – and to communicate an Islamic cosmology to the converted Muslim population. The chapter ends with an argument of what can be learned about language as a social and rhetorical resource from this premodern tradition of global translinguistics practiced in Asia.
- Notes:
- Part of an edited collection
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book chapter
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 8 months ago
- License:
- Attribution
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