People's history beneath kings and dynasties

"The path ahead felt strange—at times, it rose like a wave; at other times, it seemed to sink into an unseen depth. His steps had lost their rhythm. He moved like a man intoxicated, staggering without direction—sometimes leaning left, as if pulled by resistance, turning south, as though retreating into fear." 

This disoriented figure—Shyamang, a potter and temple sculptor—appears at the very beginning of Prodoshe Praakritajan, Shawkat Ali's remarkable historical novel first published in 1984 by University Press Limited.

Shyamang, a praakritajan or man of the earth, staggers both physically and metaphorically. His broken state reflects the deeper collapse of a class—ordinary people in a shifting, unrecorded Bengal.

The book's dedication reads, "In memory of the struggling ancestors of Raṛh, Varendra, and Banga." It is a subtle cue that the story will not follow the linear history of kings and dynasties but instead focus on those who lived, loved, suffered, and died outside the formal annals of power.

We have all studied the outlines of Bengal's past: the Pala, the Sena, the Sultanate, and the Mughal empires. These names dominate our textbooks and job exam syllabus. But what of the potters, the fisherfolk, the weavers, and the monks? What of those who walked barefoot along the banks of the Atrai and Punarbhabha, who prayed without temples and suffered without being recorded? 

Prodoshe Praakritajan offers a rare corrective. Set in the 12th century—between 1100 and 1200 AD—during the reign of the Sena dynasty, the novel transports us to a time when the sociopolitical structure of Bengal was undergoing profound shifts.

The Palas, Buddhist by affiliation, had allowed a relatively plural society. The Sens, Brahmin-turned-Kshatriya rulers, enforced a harsher, more stratified regime.

As Brahminical orthodoxy rose, caste-based oppression deepened. Lower castes lost access to worship, and their religious duty was reduced to servitude.

This backdrop is not merely academic in Ali's hands—it's lived, brutal, and intimate. The novel moves fluidly through the lives of ordinary characters: Shyamang, the potter; Basanta Das, a merchant born of a farming family; Mayabati, his questioning wife; Mitrananda, a wandering monk; and Leelaboti, a mysterious, seductive woman whose relationships cut across lines of desire and caste.

The social fragmentation is not just downward—it is cyclical and suffocating. From maharajas to samantas, from village heads to field labourers, from upper castes to doms and naths, the hierarchy tightens its grip.

But even in despair, there is resistance. Mitrananda walks from village to village, spreading words of spiritual and social awakening. He befriends Basanta Das. Together, they dream of an alternative order. Their dreams are fragile but defiant.

Then comes news: a new force has arrived. The Yavanas, or Muslim warriors and mystics, are entering Bengal. To some, they promise salvation; to others, destruction.

For the Praakritajans, exhausted by both caste tyranny and royal indifference, this "third force" brings hope, albeit laced with fear. Shyamang, hardened by suffering, concludes bitterly, "For one who sees nothing, what does it matter whether it's light or dark?"

The novel does not romanticise these new arrivals. They carry both love and the sword. Nor does it offer any neat resolution. Instead, it examines the complex, sometimes tragic negotiations that ordinary people engage in when power shifts hands. 

Despite being under 200 pages, Prodoshe Praakritajan is densely populated. Characters move in and out, each carrying a sliver of a larger narrative.

It would be misleading to say only the 'central' characters matter. Every figure here adds to the mosaic of a time forgotten or erased.

And perhaps that is the novel's most powerful contribution. It reminds us that history is not only made in courts and on battlefields but also in huts, markets, riverbanks, and temples. In this sense, Shawkat Ali offers a new proposition for historical thinking—one that centres on the dispossessed and the unnamed.

I was reading the twelfth edition of Prodoshe Praakritajan, published in 2018, and couldn't help but feel how eerily relevant it still is. Nearly four decades after its initial release, the novel remains resonant with our present. The faces of authority may have changed, but the systems of domination remain alarmingly familiar. 

The helplessness of the praakritajans—those forgotten people who lived outside the margins of recorded history—still lingers among us in new forms and new names. In that sense, Shawkat Ali's novel is not merely a literary reconstruction of the past; it is a powerful proposal for a new way of engaging with history—one that restores voice to the voiceless and memory to the erased.  

hmarafat218@gmail.com