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Thibaut D’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Alaol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan
Chinmaya Lal Thakur — Department of Creative Arts and English, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
The author identifies two interrelated ambitions: to analyse the poetics of the Bengali author of Arakan Alaol (floruit [fl.] 1651–71), and to provide a non-presentist historical account of Arakanese Bengali literature as ‘one of the most fascinating instances of cultural encounter that took place in the pre-modern world’. The book has an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The introduction and Chapter 1 lay out methodological considerations. D’Hubert clarifies that by ‘tradition’ he means ‘the dynamic process of transmission of generic models’, implying ‘the recourse to a methodology mapping the intertextual nexus in which each text is located’. From such a vantage point, the formation of a ‘composite’ literary tradition in the Arakan (ca. 1430–1638) has to be understood with reference to the early modern shift from agrarian inland to coastal states relying upon trade and tax collection.
This was accompanied by the emergence of what D’Hubert calls the ‘vernacular kingdoms of the Bay of Bengal’ and the formation of several upper regional languages: Dakhani (in various spellings) in the Deccan, Bengali in Eastern South Asia and Malay in the Indonesian Archipelago. By emphasising the very different regional organisation of pre-modern eastern South Asia that does not map onto the boundaries of modern nation states, and by locating Arakanese Bengali literature within the ‘long-term geographical and cultural continuum’ constituted by coastal Myanmar and southeastern Bengal, D’Hubert seeks to counter presentist narratives narrowly focused on ethnic and religious categories. Although the focus ofthe book is on Alaol and literary ‘urbanity’ in the capital city of Mrauk-U, Chapter 1 also includes a broad overview of developments in the rural areas of Chittagong, Dhaññavati and Bhulua.
