A History of Protest from Past to Present

Sumanta Banerjee

The rise of the fakirs, who come mostly from the Muslim community, was not an isolated phenomenon in the history of Bengali society and religion. They were a part of a wider constellation of numerous syncretistic religious sects that shone over the Bengali popular religious scene during the sixteenth to seventeenth century. They continued to thrive in rural Bengal through the British colonial period, and still survive in the villages of Bengal. These sects occupy a special position in the history of Bengali popular religion, creating a subculture of their own. One nineteenth century Bengali scholar, Akshay Kumar Dutta, listed some fifty-odd syncretistic sects, which flourished all over India during his lifetime, and which originated in the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Among them, at least forty were found in Bengal alone.

The development and popularity of these syncretistic sects should be understood in a dual context: first, the socio-religious composition of Bengali society at the time of their birth; and second, the cultural tradition that continues down to the present times in rural society, where people require songs and music not only for entertainment but also for their deep spiritual needs.

To go back to the socio-religious past that gave birth to these sects and their songs, we should note that Bengali society at that time was occupied by the twin religious establishments: one ruled by the Brahmanical order according to strictly laid down hierarchical caste-bound norms for the Hindus; and the other by the ashrafs (Muslim aristocrats and clergy who claimed descent from the earlier Arab, Turkish, Afghan and Moghul settlers) for the Muslims.