ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter, I have attempted to give an overview of motifs used in Maijbhandari songs and explain them by a circular semantic analysis. And, as we have seen, several religious traditions have left their traces in Maijbhandari songs. A historical and philological approach to them shows in which way images, motifs and religious concepts from various sides have found accommodation in this open and popular tradition. It can, however, explain only in part how such conceptual permeability has come into being and is maintained. No doubt, the contemporary ethos of Maijbhandar, resumed and celebrated in the formula dharmajātinirbiśeṣe, ‘irrespective of religion and caste/class’, acts as an overarching protective ideology for this permeability. It generates a general climate of permissiveness towards a wide variety of religious expression. But no more than this – it does not supply the rationale for understanding and treating such diverse forms of expression beyond preaching a reverent and tolerant attitude towards them. Nor do Maijbhandari theological writings teach their readers how to deal with and how to understand religious concepts, present in the songs, that fall beyond the pale of a generally acclaimed Maijbhandari Sufi canon. In order to come closer to an understanding of the way in which Maijbhandari songs have acquired such stable religious permeability, I felt it necessary to look at their reception. In a series of interviews, I asked members of the movement and persons loosely connected or acquainted with it to interpret a chosen number of Maijbhandari songs for me. In the selection of my interviewees, I attempted to achieve an acceptable degree of mean variation with regard to their religious affi li ation (Muslims and Hindus), social status, gender and the closeness of their affi liation to Maijbhandar. This attempt does not, of course, in the least provide any reliable degree of representativeness, and is certainly very far from being statistically valid in any sense. But such validity was not intended. My aim was, instead, to look for patterns of reception, and in this sense the attempt has been fruitful indeed. Twenty interviewees were questioned, in 1999 and 2001, about a total of fi fteen songs by nine authors. Four of these twenty persons were Hindus. Only three were female, due in part to the communicative diffi culties and restrictions resulting from my status as a male Western researcher and visitor. Except one, an urban intellec-
Maijbhandar in one way or the other. Four among them were pīrzadas. Several belonged to the murīds affi liated to different manzils. Two were themselves writers of Maijbhandari songs, another two professional or semi-professional singers. More than half of my interviewees came from a rural background, with different degrees of contact with urban life. Formal education ranked from none to Ph.D; in general, however, my collocutors had more formal education and were much older than the average person in Chittagong. The interpretation process I asked my interviewees to go through was quite a complex sort of communication and exegesis. First of all, the authors chosen for interpretation are considered authoritative voices in Maijbhandar, and therefore no part of any song could simply be dismissed. Secondly, as much as interpretations of something, these were interpretations for an outsider in what mostly resulted in a teaching situation. The interview situations were quite varied, and took very disparate periods of time (from 40 minutes to approximately fi ve hours). Usually, at least some of the songs chosen by me were known to the intervieweeinterpreters. Younger people often declined to interpret the songs for me and referred me to ‘those who know’. In one or two cases, interviewees felt that my questioning was strategic rather than truth-seeking, and refused to carry on; in other cases, in turn, my questioning became genuine rather than strategic. The songs were selected with regard to topicality. Topics of special interest were dehatattva and yogic concepts, female bhakti and the reappearance of the same divine agent on earth. That is, I singled out songs for this ‘collective interpretation’ that would, according to a historical and philological perspective, appear as especially heterogeneous; or, from a purist Islamist perspective, as particularly deviant. My aim in this selection was to examine if and how boundaries between supposed traditions of belief are perceived, and how they are tackled. I made it my principle not to interfere with the process of interpretation on the part of my interlocutors, but as the interviews often tended to develop into discussions, the distinctions and purpose underlying my choice did, in a few cases, have effects on the directions my interviewees’ explanations took. I usually offered to give my literate interlocutors the texts beforehand and hold the interview in a second sitting, but almost all preferred to give ad hoc interpretations, paraphrasing the songs line after line. What most interpreted as a teaching situation has in a few cases generated forced interpretations which were upheld only for the sake of maintaining the teacher’s position; such interpretations are, however, easily identifi able. It was not possible to have all songs interpreted by all interviewees, mostly due to time limits set by them. On average, my interviewees interpreted eight songs. Altogether, then, approximately 160 interpretations of single songs were collected. In the following, thus, I want to present some salient features of these interviews. I shall fi rst give the relevant parts of the song texts. Then I shall summarise the various interpretations and, following that, give my analysis of them with possible comments. In the fi rst section, emphasis is on the ways that sandhābhāṣā is deciphered; the remaining ones deal with the conceptualisation of
6.1 Boat journeys and sandhābhāṣā One of the songs chosen from this category was Mājhi tribeṇīr ghāṭer joẏār, a dehatattva song in ‘intentional language’ (sandhābhāṣā) by Ramesh Shil (cf. my discussion of it in Section 5.7.13). The results attained from around fi fteen interviews about this song seem particularly interesting, and since the song (like other boat journey songs) has a real plot, its translation is again given in full:
Boatman, move onwards catching the fl ood of the quay of three streams [tribeṇīr ghāṭ]./Steer your boat slowly with the inner picture [Ar. barzaḫ] of the Bhandari./The fi rst quay is the market of nāsūt, be on the watch./At that quay is the fair of robbers, you are inclined to lose the root./After that comes the city of malakūt, keep steady your direction./There are the moon and the sun to your right and left, go through the middle./In ğabarūt, there is play of the wind, set your sails./Hold your helm as you see the bend of the imperceptible./Ramesh says: Attain the sight of the divine at the quay of lāhūt./(Finally,) when pīr and murīd take on one colour, pass [your time] in joy.1
