Sweta Dutta gave a recent brown bag talk titled “Merciful tongues and bountiful blessings: Language, Authority and Charisma in Phakirrāmi.”
As Dutta’s paper explained, Satya Pīr remains a popular subaltern messenger of Allah worshiped by Hindus and Muslims alike in parts of West Bengal and Bangladesh. In Phakirrāmi, a 19th century Middle Bengali text, Phakir Rām Dās invokes various religious figures from the Brahmanic and Puranic traditions to offer legitimacy to Satya Pīr’s cult; in the process he also constructs a genealogy of charisma that is uniquely authoritative to the saint. Sometimes a wrathful sanyāsi, an impoverished benevolent phakir or at other times as a malevolent lord, Satya Pīr also speaks in different tongues. What does authority look like in a subaltern god? How does authority function through the figure of Satya Pīr in democratizing resources and wealth? Is it revealed when he speaks in different tongues? Or does it become apparent in his ability to simultaneously dispense mercy and punishment? These are some of the questions highlighted in her talk.
Sweta is a third year PhD student in Religious Studies. She studies premodern Islam in South Asia, specifically Bengali Sufi literatures from the 16th-19th centuries. Her research looks at the relationship between authorship and audience reception in littoral political economies and she wishes to trace a history of vernacular religious life in the Gangetic deltas. Additionally, she studies Indic languages like Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu and Middle Bengali.
The College of Arts