Authorship, reception, and memory in early modern Bengal: Songs attributed to saiyad sultan

This article examines issues of authorial memory and reception pertaining to thirteen Bangla songs (padavali) ascribed to the seventeenth-century Bengali Sufi poet, Saiyad Sultan. This author is best known for the Nabiva?sa ("The Prophet's Lineage")- a universal history of the Prophet Muhammad. A manual on Sufi yoga entitled Jñana Pradipa ("Lamp of Knowledge") also holds the authorial signature "Saiyad Sultan," as does an acrostic poem on esoteric themes, entitled Jñana Cautisa ("The Thirty-Four Consonants of Knowledge"). Ten Bangla songs are ascribed likewise, while three others hold the signature of "Sultan." The Bengali literary historians M. E. Haq and Ahmad Sharif unquestioningly attributed all of these works to a single historical figure. This essay interrogates such simplistic assumptions. After evaluating these songs in light of the authorial voices of the Nabiva?sa and the Jñana Pradipa, I examine how authorial memory is encoded in the Bangla literary tradition in multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways. Two frameworks are proposed to interpret the conundrum of authorship of the corpus of works written in the name of Saiyad Sultan.