Material Texts

Meaningful Rituals: Persian, Arabic and Bengali in the Nūrnāma Tradition of Eastern Bengal explores a corpus of texts that centre around the creation of the world by God through his prophet Muḥammad in his primordial form as a luminous entity. These short accounts, which bear the title Nūrnāma (The Book of Light), played two roles: as conveyers of knowledge regarding basic Islamic beliefs and cosmology, and as ritual texts meant to protect and bring prosperity to those who read and preserved the physical artefact of the book that contained that knowledge. In addition to introductory chapters on Muslim literacy in eastern Bengal and the treatment of light in scholastic and non-scholastic Muslim literature, Meaningful Rituals contains the text and annotated translations of several Persian and Bengali versions of the Nūrnāma, written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. A close study of this tradition in eastern Bengal demonstrates the rural literati’s engagement with Persian and Arabic languages and literacy. Beyond the domain of Bengali language and literature, the book opens a new chapter on Indo-Persian studies by shedding light on the didactic and ritual uses of Persian texts in rural Bengal.

The codex has become ubiquitous in the modern world as a common way of presenting the materiality of texts. Much of the scholarship on the History of the Book has taken this endpoint for granted even when discussing pre-modern writing and manuscript cultures. In this essay, I would like to open the discussion to other possibilities. I will draw on my research on medieval South Asian religions and from my hands-on work with manuscripts in two collections: the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh and the Indic collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing examples from these two collections as well as noting broader patterns within them, this essay reflects on what South Asian manuscript traditions can contribute to our understanding of the materiality of texts. First, I consider how different articulations of orality, memory, ritual, and aesthetics in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism helped to shape the development and formation of manuscript traditions in South Asia with dynamics that might differ from medieval manuscript traditions shaped by Christianity in the West. Then, I turn to specific insights into the materiality of South Asian manuscripts in relation to the task of cataloguing, preserving, and digitizing materials in the Rāmamālā library.

This essay traces the emergence, reappearance, and reception of the sibyl through Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing—moving from newspaper essays, notebooks and letters, to The Statesman's Manual (1816) and Sibylline Leaves (1817). The sibylline exists in relation to a corollary category that cuts across bibliographic, commercial, poetical, theological, and philosophical contexts: the fugitive. Coleridge invokes the sibyl as an authorizing figure for the mediation of fugitive knowledge and its variously recursive and revelatory logics. Fugitive knowledge offers fresh interpretative possibilities for understanding the relationship between the poet's "wilderness of Scraps" and his projected great works.

The codex has become ubiquitous in the modern world as a common way of presenting the materiality of texts. Much of the scholarship on the History of the Book has taken this endpoint for granted even when discussing pre-modern writing and manuscript cultures. In this essay, I would like to open the discussion to other possibilities. I will draw on my research on medieval South Asian religions and from my hands-on work with manuscripts in two collections: the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh and the Indic collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing examples from these two collections as well as noting broader patterns within them, this essay reflects on what South Asian manuscript traditions can contribute to our understanding of the materiality of texts. First, I consider how different articulations of orality, memory, ritual, and aesthetics in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism helped to shape the development and formation of manuscript traditions in South Asia with dynamics that might differ from medieval manuscript traditions shaped by Christianity in the West. Then, I turn to specific insights into the materiality of South Asian manuscripts in relation to the task of cataloguing, preserving, and digitizing materials in the Rāmamālā library.

Perversions of Paper is a one-day symposium investigating the outer limits of our interactions with books and with paper. It considers unorthodox engagements with texts, from cherishing or hoarding them to mutilating and desecrating them, from wearing them to chewing them, and from inhaling their scent to erasing their content. ‘Perversion’ may apply to deviations from normal usage but also to our psychological investments in paper. To talk of having a fetish for books is common, but is there more to this than merely well-worn cliché? This symposium invites reflections on perverse uses of – and relationships with – paper and parchment. What part do books and other written artefacts play in our imaginary and psychic lives, and what complex emotional attachments do we develop towards them? Also, how might literary studies or cultural history register these impulses and acts; what kind of methodologies are appropriate?