In the Shade of the Golden Palace

In the Shade of the Golden Palace explores the oeuvre of the prolific Bengali poet and translator Alaol (fl. 1651–1671), who rendered five narrative poems and one versified treatise from medieval Hindi and Persian into Bengali. The book maps the genres, structures, and themes of Alaol’s works, paying special attention to the poet’s own discourse on poetics and his literary genealogy, which included Sanskrit, Avadhi, Maithili, Persian, and Bengali authors. The monograph shows how a variety of literary experiments fostered by multilingual literacy took place in a seemingly remote corner of the Bay of Bengal: the kingdom of Arakan that lay between todays southeastern Bangladesh and Myanmar. After a careful contextualization of the emergence of Bengali Muslim literature in Arakan, I focus on courtly speech in Alaol’s poetry, his revisiting of classical categories in a vernacular context, and the prominent role of the discipline of lyrical arts (i.e. music, dance) in his conceptualization of the poetics of the written word. The book also contains a detailed analysis of Middle Bengali narrative poems, as well as translations of Old Maithili, Brajabuli, and Middle Bengali lyric poems that illustrate the styles that formed the core of connoisseurship in the regional courts of eastern South Asia, from Nepal to Arakan. The monograph operates on three levels: as a unique vade mecum for readers of Middle Bengali poetry, a detailed study of the cultural history of the frontier region of Arakan, and an original contribution to the poetics of South Asian literatures.