1. Rockhill, “Notes on the Relations,” 436. The pitch of the state’s land revenue demand is not known for certain. In his “Descriptions of the Barbarians of the Isles,” cited by Rockhill, Wang Ta-Yüan noted in 1349 that the government demanded one-fifth of the total produce in taxes. Just four years later, however, Ibn Battuta wrote that the government claimed one half of the produce of Hindu farmers in the Habiganj region of Sylhet District. It is possible that both observations were correct, and that the higher rate noted by Ibn Battuta represented the claim (jama‘) demanded by the government, whereas the lower rate noted by the Chinese represented the amount of revenue actually collected (ḥāṣil). In any event, it would be wrong to see Bengal’s Muslim rulers as having driven the peasants into the forested hinterland by policies of excessive taxation, since any abandonment of cultivable lands would only have deprived the state of its principal source of wealth. Rather, the state evidently tolerated, and probably encouraged, a moderate and controlled movement of peasants into formerly forested areas. See Rockhill, “Notes on the Relations,” 435; Ibn Battuta, Rehla, 241. [BACK]

2. Silver, which was mined nowhere within the delta itself, had for centuries before the Turkish conquest been imported from the Burma-Yunnan border region where the upper Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, and Irrawady rivers nearly converge. From there it migrated into the delta via overland and river routes leading to the Arakan coast and the upper Brahmaputra Valley. John Deyell, “The China Connection: Problems of Silver Supply in Medieval Bengal,” in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. J. F. Richards (Durham, N. C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1983), 207–24. [BACK]

3. Ibid., 214–15. [BACK]

4. See Ibid., chart 2, 227. [BACK]

5. Rockhill, “Notes on the Relations,” 444. [BACK]

6. Ibid., 437. [BACK]

7. Cesare Federici, “Extracts of Master Caesar Frederike his Eighteene Yeers Indian Observations,” in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, by Samuel Purchas (1625; Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1905), 10: 136. [BACK]

8. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, trans. and ed. Yule and Cordier, 2: 115. [BACK]

9. Ibn Battuta, Rehla, 235. [BACK]

10. Rockhill, “Notes on the Relations,” 439–40, 443–44. [BACK]

11. Ludovico di Varthema, The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema A.D. 1503–1508, trans. John W. Jones (Hakluyt Society Publications, 1st ser., no. 32, 1863; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), 212. [BACK]

12. “A junk goes from Bengal to Malacca once a year,” Tome Pires wrote, “and sometimes twice. Each of these carries from eighty to ninety thousand cruzados worth. They bring fine white cloths, seven kinds of sinabafos, three kinds of chautares, beatilhas, beirames and other rich materials. They will bring as many as twenty kinds. They bring steel, very rich bed-canopies, with cut-cloth work in all colours and very beautiful; wall hangings like tapestry. These people sail four or five ships to Malacca and to Pase every year, and this is still done to a large extent. Bengali cloth fetches as high price in Malacca, because it is a merchandise all over the East.” Pires, Suma Oriental, 1: 92. For a discussion of Bengal’s external trade in the sixteenth century, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Notes on the Sixteenth-Century Bengal Trade,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 24, no. 3 (1987): 265–89. [BACK]

13. Moreover, on the death of one of these nobles, half of his property reverted to the crown. This also served to concentrate wealth in the hands of the sultan, and hence at the royal capital. Voyage dans les deltas du Gange, 326. [BACK]

14. Varthema, Travels of Ludovico di Varthema, 211. [BACK]

15. Pires, Suma Oriental, 1: 90. By contrast, Satgaon, a principal seaport located north of modern Calcutta, had a population of ten thousand at this time. Ibid., 91. [BACK]

16. Voyage dans les deltas du Gange, 323. [BACK]

18. Varthema, Travels of Ludovico di Varthema, 212. [BACK]

19. Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, trans. M. L. Dames (1921; reprint, Nendoln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967), 2: 135–39, 147–48. [BACK]

20. Cited in Abdul Karim, Social History of the Muslims of Bengal (down to A.D. 1538) (Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1959), 153–54. [BACK]

21. Mukundaram, Kavikaṅkaṇa Caṇḍī, ed. Srikumar Bandyopadhyay and Visvapati Chaudhuri (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1974), 343–44. As a sociologist remarked, “nobility was determined by immigration from the west in direct proportion to the nearness in point of time and distance in point of land of origin from Bengal to Arabia.” Abdul Majed Khan, “Research about Muslim Aristocracy in East Pakistan,” in P. Bessaignet, ed., Social Research in East Pakistan 2d ed., (Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1964), 22. [BACK]

22. Shamsud-Din Ahmed, ed. and trans., Inscriptions of Bengal, 4: 170–71. [BACK]

23. Ibid., 259. [BACK]

24. Ibid., 225. My translation. [BACK]

25. Krsnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami, śrī Caitanya-Caritāmṛta, ed. and trans. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (New York: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1974), ch. 17, text, 123–128; 3: 323–26. [BACK]

26. Mukundaram, Kavikaṅkaṇa Caṇḍī, 345–46. [BACK]

27. The poet’s description of the Muslim and Hindu communities of the idealized Bengali city of “Gujarat” is discussed in Edward C. Dimock, Jr., and Ronald B. Inden, “The City in Pre-British Bengal,” in Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Sound of Silent Guns and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 121–25. [BACK]

28. Duarte Barbosa, writing in 1518, seems to have had these groups in mind when he mentioned the presence of converted Muslim communities in the capital city of Gaur. See Book of Duarte Barbosa, 2: 148. [BACK]

29. These groups included the hājām (from Ar. ḥajjām), tirakar (from Pers. tīrgar), kāgajī (from Ar.-Pers. kāghażī), kalandar (from Pers. qalandar), darji (from Pers. darzī), rangrej (from Pers. rangrīz), and kasāi (from Ar. qaṣṣāb). [BACK]

30. Ronald B. Inden, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Class in Middle-Period Bengal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 75–76. [BACK]

31. Around 1595 Abu’l-fazl wrote that most of the Bengal zamīndārs were Kayasthas, and that they had comprised Bengal’s ruling class under the Pala dynasty and even earlier. Abu’l-fazl ‘Allami, ā’īn-i Akbarī (Lucknow ed.), 2: 82, 113; trans., 2: 141, 158–59. [BACK]

32. N. K. Dutt, Origin and Growth of Caste in India (Calcutta: Firma K. L.M., 1965), 2: 58–63, 97. [BACK]

33. Ronald B. Inden, Marriage and Rank, 71–77; id., Imagining India (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 49–84. [BACK]

34. Mukundaram, Kavikaṅkaṇa Caṇḍī, 355–61. [BACK]

35. William L. Smith, The One-eyed Goddess: A Study of the Manasā-Maṅgal. Oriental Studies, No. 12 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1980), 134. [BACK]

36. Ibid., 51. [BACK]

37. Ibid., 132–33. [BACK]

38. As W. L. Smith notes, Chando’s initial objection to the goddess and the nature of his ultimate acceptance of her cult “reflects that of the upper castes—it was qualified, reluctant and done without enthusiasm.” Smith, One-eyed Goddess, 182. [BACK]

39. P. K. Maity, Historical Studies in the Cult of the Goddess Manasā (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1966), 169–82. T. W. Clark, “Evolution of Hinduism in Medieval Bengali Literature: śiva, Caṇḍī, Manasā,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 17, no. 3 (1955): 507–15. [BACK]

40. Vrindavan Das, śrī-śrī Caitanya-Bhāgavat (4th ed., Calcutta, n.d.), 11. Cited in Smith, One-eyed Goddess, 30. Smith’s translation. [BACK]

41. These iconographic features compare with those characterizing a Manasa relief from Birbhum in West Bengal. See Jitendra Nath Banerjea, The Development of Hindu Iconography (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1956), 350. [BACK]

42. Mild characteristics were generally typical of those female deities who have been more comfortably accommodated in the Brahman-controlled Hindu pantheon. See Lawrence A. Babb, The Divine Hierarchy: Popular Hinduism in Central India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 221–26. [BACK]

43. An excellent analysis of the Caṇḍī-Maṅgala is found in Bhattacharya, “La Déesse.” See esp. 22–33. [BACK]

44. At one point Kalaketu states, “The king of my kingdom is Mahes Thakur [śiva]; I am its chief minister [mahāpatra], and Chandi its proprietress [adhikārī].” Mukundaram, Kavikaṅkaṇa Caṇḍī, 413. [BACK]

45. Charles Malamoud, “Village et forêt dans l’idéologie de l’Inde brahmanique,” Archives européennes de sociologie 17, no. 1 (1976), 3–14. [BACK]

46. Once he took possession of the kingdom, Kalaketu was to renounce violence against the very animals he had formerly killed, becoming now their protector. In this way the written form of the myth, clearly influenced by Brahmanical revision, attempts to resolve a classical problem of Indian kingship, namely, the king’s ritual impurity arising from his professional obligation to kill. [BACK]

47. Some Vaishnava literature and art nonetheless continued to be locally produced, as in late fifteenth century Vishnupur. See Jeremiah P. Losty, The Art of the Book in India (London: British Library, 1982), 62. [BACK]

48. Sukumar Sen, History of Bengali Literature, 3d ed. (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1979), 63–64. [BACK]

49. Ibid., 66. [BACK]

50. Dusan Zbavitel, Bengali Literature, vol. 9, fasc. 3 of A History of Indian Literature, ed. Jan Gonda (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), 149. [BACK]

51. Krsnadasa, śrī Caitanya-Caritāmṛta, trans. Bhaktivedanta, ch. 17, text, 124–28; 3: 324–26. [BACK]

52. Ibid., text, 204–12; 3: 363–66. [BACK]

53. The chief such works are the Caitanya-Bhāgavat by Vrindavan Das, composed ca. 1540; the Caitanya-Maṅgala by Jayananda, composed in the sixteenth century; the Caitanya Maṅgala by Locan Das, composed in the mid sixteenth century; the Gaurāṅga-Vijaya by Curamani Das, composed before 1560, and the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta by Krishna Das, composed ca. 1575–95. Of these, that of Krishna Das is generally considered the most authoritative. See Zbavitel, Bengali Literature, 172–75; Sen, History of Bengali Literature, ch. 8. [BACK]

54. Sen, History of Bengali Literature, 94. [BACK]

55. Mukundaram, Kavikaṅkaṇa Caṇḍī, 348, 350. [BACK]

56. James Wise, “The Hindus of Eastern Bengal,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 62, no. 3 (1893), 8. For the diffusion of Vaishnava piety in post-Chaitanya Bengal, see Ramakanta Chakrabarty, Vaisnavism in Bengal, 1486–1900 (Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1985), 275–304. [BACK]