A Persian Account of the Religious Customs of the Magh (Arakanese) from Early Colonial Bengal. Issue 6 (November 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: d'Hubert, Thibaut
• Is Part Of: Iranian studies. Volume 51:Issue 6(2018)
• Page Start: 947
• Page End: 959
• Publication Date: 2018-11
• Subjects: Persian document -- Magh (Arakanese) -- early colonial Bengal -- religious customs; Iran -- Periodicals; 955
• DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2018.1520572
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-0862

Abstract

Abstract : The document presented in this article is a quasi-ethnographic account of the religious customs of the Magh (i.e. Arakanese), which was most probably collected on the basis of firsthand observations made in the region of Chittagong, in southeastern Bengal, sometime in the 1780s, or early 1790s. The commissioner of the document is John Murray-MacGregor (1745–1822), a Scottish officer of the British East India Company, who remained in Bengal for about three decades and brought back with him one of the largest private collections of Persian manuscripts, as well as some bilingual Sanskrit–Persian texts, and twenty-two bundles of Pali and Arakanese manuscripts collected in eastern Bengal.