page_title: Sylhetis
section_title: Literature and poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Sylhetis / Culture / Literature and poetry
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of a page from a Sylheti Nagri book written in the 1800s.
context_page_description: The Sylheti people are an Indo-Aryan ethno-linguistic group who speak Sylheti and are native to the Sylhet region of northeast Bengal in the Indian subcontinent. The population is divided between the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh, three districts of the Barak Valley and in the Hojai district of Assam in India. There are sizeable populations in the Indian states of Meghalaya, Tripura in North Tripura district and Manipur. Established diaspora communities exist in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Middle East, Italy and other parts of the world. Sylhetis maintain a distinct identity separate from or in addition to having a Bengali identity due to historical and geographical reasons.
context_section_description: Sylheti poets were writing in the Bengali language by the 16th century. The Hattanather Panchali (Hattanath chronicles) collected by Manohar Sen of Dulali, Bipranath Sen and Jaikrishna Dutta are Bengali ballads which detail the history of Sylhet. When Sylhet was under the rule of the Twipra Kingdom, medieval Sylheti writers using the Bengali script included the likes of Dwija Pashupati, the author of Chandravali – considered one of the earliest Sylheti works. Nasir ad-Din Haydar of Sylhet town wrote the Tawarikh-e-Jalali, the first Bengali biography of Shah Jalal. Nur Ali Khan of Syedpur wrote Marifoti Geet and Muzaffar Khan of Ita was a poet. Muslim literature was based upon historical affairs and biographies of prominent Islamic figures. Like the rest of Muslim Bengal, Bengali Muslim poetry was written in a colloquial dialect of Bengali which came to be known as Dobhashi, and has had a major influence on Sylheti. Dobhashi featured the use of Perso-Arabic vocabulary in Bengali texts. A separate script was developed in Sylhet for this popular linguistic register. Known as the Sylheti Nagri script, its most renowned writer was Sadeq Ali whose Halatunnabi was famed as household item amongst rural Muslim communities. Manuscripts have been found of works such as Rag Namah by Fazil Nasim Muhammad, Shonabhaner Puthi by Abdul Karim, and the earliest known work Talib Huson (1549) by Gholam Huson. Late Nagri writers include Muhammad Haidar Chaudhuri who wrote Ahwal-i-Zamana in 1907 and Muhammad Abdul Latif who wrote Pohela Kitab o Doikhurar Rag in 1930.
  Sylhet, in particular the Taraf Kingdom, was also an esteemed centre for the study of Persian, an official language up until the British period, due to the high population of foreign missionaries from Central Asia and Persia following the Conquest of Sylhet. Ma'dan al-Fawaid was written in 1534 by Syed Shah Israil who is considered to be Sylhet's first author. Other prominent writers include Muhammad Arshad, Syed Rayhan ad-Din and Syed Pir Badshah. Reyazuddin of Taraf wrote a Persian book on "Dream Fruit".Ala Bakhsh Mazumdar Hamed was known to have written Tuhfatul Muhsineen and Diwan-i-Hamed. Collectively, the works of these two people belonging to the Mazumdar family of Sylhet, are regarded amongst the most creative literary works in the Sylhet region. Majid Bakht Mazumdar wrote an English book on the family history. 
  In the 19th century, Urdu had a somewhat aristocratic background in Sylhet and notable families that spoke it included the Nawabs of Longla and the Mazumdars of Sylhet. Moulvi Hamid Bakht Mazumdar, who was also fluent in Persian, wrote the Urdu prose Ain-i-Hind, a history of the Indian subcontinent. Literature written in this period included Nazir Muhammad Abdullah Ashufta's Tanbeeh al-Ghafileen, written in 1894, and the poems of Moulvi Farzam Ali Bekhud of Baniachong. Hakim Ashraf Ali Mast and Fida Sylheti were prominent Urdu poets of Sylhet in the 19th century, the latter being a disciple of Agha Ahmad Ali Isfahani. In 1946, the Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu performed a mushaira in Sylhet attracting the likes of Hafeez Jalandhari, the lyricist of the National Anthem of Pakistan.
  Popular modern writers and poets from the region include Abdur Rouf Choudhury and Chowdhury Gulam Akbar. Muhammad Mojlum Khan is a non-fiction writer best known for writing the English biographical dictionary, The Muslim 100. Prominent Bengali language non-fiction writers include Syed Murtaza Ali, Syed Mujtaba Ali and Dwijen Sharma.
caption: Front page of a Sylheti Nagari book titled Halat-un-Nabi, written in the mid-19th century by Sadeq Ali of Daulatpur, Longla, Moulvibazar