This essay will treat ‘romances’ or tales of love and heroism in Bengali literature, and will focus on narratives written by Muslims in eastern Bengal. Bengali romances commonly treat themes of erotic attraction and sensual play, devotion, and mental discipline. I will be interested in their cultivation of aesthetic and moral sentiments as described in the lives of their characters. I will be concerned with how Bengali romances represented plural social bonds and relations, and multiple and conflicting social roles and identities.

For Bengali Muslim authors I will consider first an early rendition of Madhumālatī in Bamla, written by Muhammad

Kabir, apparently in 1588 and Alaol’s seventeenth century Padmāvatī. I also will briefly contrast do-bhāshi or more

properly ‘mixed-language’ romances (using Bengali, Farsi, and Urdu), of two authors who composed in the second half of the eighteenth century: Fakir Garibullah, and Amir Hamza (Anisuzzaman 1365a, 1365b). For Bengali Hindu authors of romances, we usefully can compare Vidyā-Sundar narratives. I will examine the versions of Bharatchandra and Ramprasad, and the ‘Chittagong’ version of Balarām Chakrabartī’, all probably eighteenth century texts.

Following the argument of Thomas de Bruijn about the genre of medieval Awadhi epics shared by Hindu and

Muslim authors (2010), I will argue that Bengali romances comprised a single genre created by Hindu and Muslim

authors using a shared idiom of moral and aesthetic sentiments. I suggest that through this common genre their

narratives articulated and consciously contrasted Bengali Muslim and Bengali Hindu ideas about individuals and

families, erotic desire and marriage, and proper political order.