ABSTRACT
The land The name Bengal in its English form – Bangala or Bangal, in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and Banglā or Bangladesh (as a historical term), in its Bengali version – refers to the territory roughly situated between 27 ° and 21 ° latitude and 92.50 ° and 87 ° longitude. The eastern parts of the present Dhaka district, the districts of Comilla and Sylhet (Habānaq according to Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Suknāt in other Islamic sources and Śrihaṭṭa in Sanskrit) in Bangladesh and the state of Tripura in India were known in ancient times as Samataṭa. The northwest part of Bengal, to the west of the river Atrai up to the Ganges, is relatively high land. It was known as Gowḍa (popularly Gaur or Gauro, at times referring to the metropolitan area of the region) in the early days, and later on as Barind in Persian writings (according to an early Muslim historian, Mawlānā Minhāj al-Dīn ‘Uthmān Sirāj al-Dīn)1 or Varendra Bhūmī in local Sanskrit and Bengali writings. This was where the Muslim conquerors first settled; they used Lakhnawtī (according to Islamic sources; Lakṣmṇāvatī in Sanskrit and Bengali) and the neighbouring cities of Gaur, Devikot and later on Pandua and Ekdala as their capital. The section lying to the west of the Hugli-Bhagirathi river bore the name of Rāḍha or Rāḍh (according to the Ṭabaqāt-i-Nāṣirī of Mawlānā Minhāj al-Dīn). The northern part of Rāḍha often served as an entry point for the early Muslim forces coming overland from the north. The famous ancient port city of Tamralipti lay at the southern tip of Rāḍha. Southern Bengal (namely, Sundarban and Khulna in Bangladesh and Twenty Four Parganas in West Bengal, India) was usually known as Banga (Vańga in Sanskrit), and the coastal land as Harikela (e.g. the Chittagong area in the early period as well as Sylhet in the later period).2 Muslim geographers called it Harkand from which comes Baḥr al-Harkand, the early Arabic name for the Bay of Bengal. From the early eighth to late tenth centuries, Harikela was an independent state contiguous with Samataṭa and Vańga (which included Chandradvipa).3 The ancient Harikela kingdom once extended to Sundarban. A thick forest on the coastal region of the Gangetic delta (at present mainly in the southernmost part of the present division of Khulna in Bangladesh and in the district of Twenty Four Parganas [Chhabbish Pargana in Bengali] in the Indian state of
West Bengal), Sundarban once extended much deeper into the mainland. It bears traces of early human settlement. Indigenous non-Aryan nomad tribes roamed in this region and gradually came under the influence of Hinduism and Buddhism (through rulers such as Dummanpal around the twelfth century), and finally Islam. In the east of Harikela, a Hindu kingdom, Chandradvīpa (Deva dynasty), emerged in the thirteenth century, which was gradually absorbed in the Mughal empire in the early seventeenth century.4
