ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a detailed description about the land and the people of Bengal, their indigenous beliefs and practices and how the local histories of Bengal can be retrieved through the literary interpretations. It aims to explore the historical links between the Mangalkavyas on the one hand and Bengal’s different ethnic and occupational groups and their cultural practices on the other hand. The spatial focus is the land of the deltas of the Ganges, where the population was mostly composed of peasants, fishermen and boatmen. The main focal point of discussion is to locate the issues of marginality and hierarchy in colonial Bengal taking evidences from the literary texts such as the Mangalkavyas and various district gazetteers and the surveys of British ethnographers. Further, the chapter draws a comparative analysis between the eastern and western Bengal based on the demographic pattern and different modes of acculturation.
