Folklore in Context: Essays in Honor of Shamsuzzaman Khan
Firoz Mahmud (ed),
The University Press Limited

There are books, and, then, there are good books.  Ironically, there are books that live for the moment, as it were, getting lapped up by millions of readers within a short span of time, and, when the euphoria of popular reading dies down, go into oblivion.  In a similar vein, so many good books have to be content (if not exactly contented) with a limited readership, but often endure long after the last of that readership has passed over.  Several turn into classics; many are regarded as great by scholars and erudite readers alike.  Such is often the fate of esoteric material, especially in comparison to popular works that are quickly forgotten after having entertained a vast array of readers of a specific period in time.
Folklore in Context:  Essays in Honor of Shamsuzzaman Khan, edited by Firoz Mahmud, is one such monumental work.  As the subtitle spells out, the essays honor Shamsuzzaman Khan, an unobtrusive, dedicated scholar of culture, and the pioneer of contextual and innovative folklore scholarship in Bangladesh, whose pithy, simple, but crucial, message is that, in Mahmud's words, "folklore needs to be studied more seriously" ("Preface").  32 authors from nine different countries, including such luminaries as Amartya Sen, Margaret Mills, and Henry Glassie, have contributed to the anthology.  32 articles have been divided among 13 self-explanatory (content-wise) sections:  Introduction, Cultural Impact on Civilization, Esoteric Folklore, Oral History and Discourse in Folklore, Folk Literature, Jewish Folklore, Urban Folklore, Performance Folklore, Folk Culture, Folklife, Folk Art and Material Culture, The Role of the Museum in History, Culture and Heritage, and Folklorist Study in Bangladesh.  Barring a very few unremarkable efforts, the quality of the essays generally has been good, with some standing out for their rich scholarship, presentation, and capacity for inducing deep thought in the reader.  Although a few articles deal with Bangladesh, others offer glimpses into other countries' folklore and/or conceptual analysis of a critical underpinning of a nation's culture:  its folklore tradition.
The first three chapters (in "Introduction") are devoted to Shamsuzzaman Khan, one written by the editor, and another by his daughter Sharani Zaman, the associate editor of the book.  We come across a person hailing from Manikganj, arguably the richest district of Bangladesh in terms of folklore, who has devoted most of his professional life and beyond to the scientific collection of folklore items, developing theories around it, and, probably more significantly, in M. Shahinoor Rahman's words, "motivated the new scholars to think about folklore beyond the so-called airtight boundary of the study of folklore" (Ch. 3, "Shamsuzzaman Khan:  A Multidimensional Personality").  He has relentlessly pursued the notion that folklore is dynamic; not static, stuck in some imagined vortex of time.  Therefore, he wrote in 1994:  "With the passage of time…folklore now includes, not only the folk art, folk craft, folk architecture, folk costume, folk dance, folk music, folk medicine, folk custom, Mith (sic) Ritual, Superstitions, Festivals, and folk belief but the daily lives of community people, computer and xerox loves (sic) and many other emerging items."  In effect, folklore plays, as Khan maintains, "a tremendous role in shaping and sharpening national culture and identity."  And the way that Khan has profiled the folklore of Bangladesh, it leaves no doubt about this country's fundamentally tolerant (of different faiths), secular, and Sufi tradition, besides his own broad secular outlook:  Bangladesh is blessed with an "excellent social situation based on humanism and secular thought…. Mainly four streams mingled in this social thought process --- tribal anthromorphism, Buddhist nihilism, Hindu vaishnavism and Muslim sufism."  Religious fanaticism turning the country back to medieval times just does not fit the average Bangladeshi's psyche.
We learn that William J. Thomas, a British scholar, first coined the term "folklore" in 1846, and that, after much debate with alternative rendering of the term in Bengali, has now generally been accepted in usage in this language in Bangladesh.  Mahmud (Ch. 1, "Shamsuzzaman Khan:  Pioneer of Contextual and Innovative Folklore Scholarship in Bangladesh"), drawing on history, has critically explored various facets of folklore, and provides an account of how Rabindranath Tagore, between 1880 and 1910, when he became active in both nationalist and folklore movements, saw the possibilities that folklore could play "in creating both a national and regional identity, and in bridging the widening gap between urban and rural dwellers", and promptly launched himself on a mission of collecting Baul songs, folk ballads (palligiti), dramas (jatra), and fairytales (rupkatha) from different parts of British Bengal.
Amartya Sen (Ch. 4, "An Assessment of the Millennium"), an illustrious son of Manikganj, has written a brilliant essay dissecting history to dispel myths and highlight truths that are at times mired under myriad half truths and outright falsehoods.  He poses the question to himself whether there is any validity to hardline Hindu activists who maintain that "the pre-Muslim period was the era of purity of the unalloyed Indian civilization."  And finds the answer:  "…even pre-Muslim India was not just Hindu India.  Indeed…perhaps the greatest Indian emperor in the pre-Muslim period was a Buddhist, to wit, Asoka, and there were other great non-Hindu Emperors, including Harsha."  And, tellingly, "It must also be recollected that nearly all the major world religions other than Islam was already well represented in India well before the last millennium."  Sen's is a profound discussion, within the confines of limited space, of broad facets of culture.  Talking about the impact of the West on traditional societies, he poses the very pertinent question, "Isn't there a difference between cultural contact and culture dependence?"  He elaborates on the point, which is particularly appropriate in this age of the internet and globalization:  "…we may have ground to resent the import of a practice from elsewhere when it stifles or obliterates some local practice or tradition to which the regional people have reason to attach value.  Each such use has to be judged, on the one hand, by what it offers (what valuable things we learn from others), and on the other, by what it may stifle (what valuable things of our own we forget as a result of outside influence)."
Ulo Valk (Ch. 11, "The Scientification of Legends as Strategy for Belief Verification") gives a delightful account of Estonian legends as a part of folklore, while Dan Ben-Amos and Dov Noy (Ch. 13, "Numbers as Meta-Language in Jewish Folklore") provides a fascinating study of the links between numbers and letters in Jewish folklore.  Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Ch 12, "Chandrabati Ramayana:  Lady Sings the Blues when Women Retell the Ramayana") studies Sita's travails from a gender perspective.  It is an interesting and instructive piece.  Abhi Subedi (Ch. 15, "Folk Fetish, Fiddles and Metropolitan Visitors") provides much more than a glimpse into fetish culture in Nepal, and, based on his discussion, concludes that "…folk and urbanity are not distinct phrases of development."  Lala Rukh Selim (Ch. 29, "Novera Ahmed and Her Sculptures:  Evaluations in Different Contexts") draws a sympathetic picture of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a truly pioneering woman of Bangladesh, Novera Ahmed.  Way ahead of her times in the context of this country's society, Novera's story is inspiring, even if depressing in terms of societal norms and strictures.
Christina Nygren (Ch. 16, "Yatra --- Popular Theatre Moving with the Wind") writes a compelling first-hand account of a theater form that, "without support and acceptance also for the genuine rural and less sophisticated performances and venues, its continued existence seems to be in serious danger."  She engages in a spirited discussion about highbrow/elite and lowbrow/popular cultures, and thus summarizes:  "Lowbrow culture…is disdained by society's "taste judges" and overlooked in the cultural section of newspapers…. Highbrow culture…tends to be regarded as the "serious," official culture; the kind that is often considered our "cultural heritage" in text books and historical accounts."  This is a universal perspective, which leads Nygren to pose an intriguing question following a short narrative:  "Political and economic resources are focused on getting people to see "serious" theatre, listen to "fine" music and read "good" literature.  Serious, fine and good for whom?"  In Bangladesh, she finds that the mentality of not only of religious literalism, but equally of the highly educated and the representatives of highbrow performing arts tends to be the taunt, "Jatra dekhe, fatra loke".  Such viewpoint necessarily corners Jatra, a situation that is compounded by unscrupulous organizers exploiting the situation to introduce gambling and strip dancing at Jatra shows.
Frank Korom (Ch. 18, "Gurusaday Dutt, Vernacular Nationalism, and the Folk Culture Revival in Colonial Bengal") is convinced that folk culture was used by the British raj as a part of its divida et impera policy.  The distinguished scholar Henry Glassie (Ch. 23, "Mud and Mythic Vision:  Hindu Sculpture in Modern Bangladesh"), based on his first-hand study of Bangladesh's folk tradition and culture, comes up with a profound philosophical perspective:  "…in Bangladesh…images, not narratives (are) at the heart of the mythic system…in which the familiar is reversed, in which the image is central, ritual forms the prime context, and stories are cast in an ancillary, illustrative role."  Amalendu De (Ch. 5, "Fazlul Huq and His Reaction to the Two-Nation Theory (1940-47)) alludes to the theoreticians of the two-nation theory from the time of Sir Syed Ahmed.  He does not mention two Punjabis, both Hindus, one rather obscure and the other quite prominent in Indian history, who had actually proposed the division of India along communal lines.  Bhai Parmanand Chibber did so in a small booklet written in 1923, while Lala Lajpat Rai in a series of articles published in 1924 in The Tribune of Punjab proposed that the Punjab should be partitioned, with the western part going to the Muslims, and the east to the Hindus and the Sikhs.  He further proposed that there should be separate Muslim states in the Northwest Frontier Province, Sind, and Bengal.
Occasional spelling errors indicate editorial oversight, while there is an amusing howler in Perveen Ahmad's "Bangladesh Kantha Art in the Indo-Gangetic Heritage" (Ch. 27).  The script talks about "defecation of the tiger", which is a very normal occurrence, but in the context of the paragraph, the proper word should have been "deification"!  Actually, a few lines down, the proper spelling has been used.  Folklore in Context:  Essays in Honor of Shamsuzzaman Khan is rich in varied aspects of folklore, and discussed with much erudition by a bevy of competent scholars.

Shahid Alam is an actor, writer, educationist and former diplomat.