Essay · 2026
Reading Bengal beyond religious boundaries
Mohammad Habib Reza
The Daily Star 23 June 2026
Abstract
The essay argues that Bengal ‘is rarely permitted to speak in its own historical voice’, being read instead through frameworks produced elsewhere. As an alternative it proposes ‘what might be called a syncretic cultural history’: not syncretism ‘in the simplistic sense of religious mixing, but as a method of reading layered civilisational formation’.
It traces a civilisational logic ‘rooted in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta’, older than the arrival of Sanskrit and of Islam, and describes how Bengal absorbed and transformed each tradition that reached it. It draws on historians and theorists including Richard M. Eaton, Asim Roy, Shahab Ahmed, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Niharranjan Ray, Dinesh Chandra Sen, Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Talal Asad, Ashis Nandy, Saba Mahmood and Akeel Bilgrami.
The essay does not mention New Contextualism.
Editorial summary Summary written by the editors
Cite this record
Reza, Mohammad Habib. 2026b. “Reading Bengal beyond religious boundaries.” The Daily Star, June 23, 2026. https://www.thedailystar.net/slow-reads/focus/news/reading-bengal-beyond-religious-boundaries-4205971.
Reza, M. H. (2026, June 23). Reading Bengal beyond religious boundaries. The Daily Star. https://www.thedailystar.net/slow-reads/focus/news/reading-bengal-beyond-religious-boundaries-4205971
@article{reza-2026-reading-bengal,
author = {Reza, Mohammad Habib},
title = {{Reading Bengal beyond religious boundaries}},
journal = {The Daily Star},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://www.thedailystar.net/slow-reads/focus/news/reading-bengal-beyond-religious-boundaries-4205971}
} TY - NEWS AU - Reza, Mohammad Habib TI - Reading Bengal beyond religious boundaries T2 - The Daily Star SE - Slow Reads PY - 2026 DA - 2026/06/23/ UR - https://www.thedailystar.net/slow-reads/focus/news/reading-bengal-beyond-religious-boundaries-4205971 KW - syncretic cultural history KW - Bengal delta KW - civilisational history KW - history of religion ID - reza-2026-reading-bengal ER -
In-text: (Reza 2026b) Download RIS