A puthi (Bengali : পুঁথি, Perso-Arab: پوتھی) is a book or writing of poetic fairy tales and religious stories of Bengal and present-day East India, which were read by a senior "educated" person while others would listen. This was used as a medium for education and constructive entertainment. [1]
Puthis were manuscripts written in the Bengali or Odia languages, utilising scripts such as the Odia, Sylheti Nagri, Bengali and Perso-Arabic script. They were mostly used in Bengal, Arakan and East India. [2] [3] [4] Puthi (پوتھی, /po:t̪ʰi:/) is a Sanskrit originated feminine noun which means book.
The pages of puthis could be leaves, leather, sheets of wood, or barks. This was common before the invention of paper. Usually, they were written on one side and bound with a piece of string. This made it resistant to insects as well, allowing it to survive for a long time. [5]
Abdul Karim Sahitya Bisharad collected more than 2,000 puthis. More than 1,000 of them were written by Bengali Muslims. No other person or organization has collected this number of puthis before.
Majority of puthis were written in the Bengali script. There have also been puthis written using the Arabic script. The register used in these puthis was predominantly Dobhashi Bengali , a variety of Bengali which lacked the tatsamas present in modern Bengali and used heavily Arabic and Persian vocabulary.
Syed Ismail Hossain Siraji was a Bengali author and poet from Sirajganj in present-day Bangladesh. He is considered to be one of the key authors of period of the Bengali Muslim reawakening; encouraging education and glorifying the Islamic heritage. He also contributed greatly to introducing the Khilafat Movement in Bengal, and provided medical supplies to the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars. Anal-Prabaha, his first poetry book, was banned by the government and he was subsequently imprisoned as the first South Asian poet to allegedly call for independence against the British Raj. The government issued Section 144 against him 82 times in his lifetime.
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Dobhashi or Dobhashi Bengali is a neologism used to refer to a historical register of the Bengali language which borrowed extensively, in all aspects, from Arabic and Persian. It became the most customary form for composing puthi poetry predominantly using the traditional Bengali alphabet. However, Dobhashi literature was produced in the modified Arabic scripts of Chittagong and Nadia. The standardisation of the modern Bengali language during the colonial period, eventually led to its decline.
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Mohammad Raushan Yazdani was a Bengali author and researcher of folk literature. As a folklorist, his work was crucial due to his discoveries of tales and poems from the remotest villages of eastern Bengal. His most celebrated work is Momenshahir Loka-Sahitya dedicated to folk literature in Momenshahi (Mymensingh) Yazdani was one of the most popular Bengali poets in the Pakistan period.
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Nūr Qut̤b ʿĀlam was a 14th-century Bengali Islamic scholar, author and poet. Based in the erstwhile Bengali capital Hazrat Pandua, he was the son and successor of Alaul Haq, a senior scholar of the Bengal Sultanate. He is noted for his efforts in preserving the Muslim rule of Bengal against Raja Ganesha and pioneering the Dobhashi tradition of Bengali literature.