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An illustration from ‘Jungle Nama’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
Ecological concerns echo from ‘Jungle Nama’, Amitav Ghosh’s verse adaptation of the medieval Bengali tale about the forest goddess, Bon Bibi
While researching for his 2016 book,
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh paid close attention to the way premodern texts are written and designed, specifically how they engage with the natural world. Among other things, the book elaborates upon two points: medieval texts across language and region have a wide-ranging engagement with nature, and a great many of them have a strong visual component to them. The illustrations aren’t static accessories; they are essential to the ‘grammar’ of these texts.
This cross-religious invocation stands as testimony to the inherent pluralism of this deltaic region, which is not just a confluence of rivers from the east, the west, and the north, but also a land that has witnessed the convergence of belief systems from far and wide. These are age-old practices that are well-documented and corroborated. In 1917, Rai Saheb Dineshchandra Sen, in his Lectures delivered to the Calcutta University asserts, Songs of Manasa Devi are sung by professional Muhammadan minstrels in Mymensingh and other districts [of Eastern Bengal].
Unfortunately, we cannot deny the fact that culture is now a primary site for struggle , with plurality, as mentioned above, and cultural diversity coming under the two-pronged threat of fundamentalist forces and the market operated by transnational capital. These threats are a matter of urgent concern. From our history, we know that the State is a cultural construct. Any threat to culture adversely effects cultural at