Abstract: The rise of the fakirs, who come mostly from the Muslim community, was not an isolated phenomenon in the history of Bengali society and religion. They were a part of a wider constellation of numerous syncretistic religious sects that shone over the Bengali popular religious scene during the sixteenth to seventeenth century. They continued to thrive in rural Bengal through the British colonial period, and still survive in the villages of Bengal. These sects occupy a special position in the history of Bengali popular religion, creating a subculture of their own. One nineteenth century Bengali scholar, Akshay Kumar Dutta, listed some fifty-odd syncretistic sects, which flourished all over India during his lifetime, and which originated in the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Among them, at least forty were found in Bengal alone.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-27
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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