Long before scholars in Bangladesh paid serious attention to the folk ballads of Mymensingh, a Czech Indologist named Dusan Zbavitel was already making the case that they belonged among the high points of Bengali literature. His 1963 study, Bengali Folk-Ballads From Mymensingh And The Problem Of Their Authenticity, published by the University of Calcutta, remains the first serious literary examination of these songs.
The ballads in question are the Maimansimha-gitika, a collection edited in 1923 by Rai Bahadur Dineshchandra Sen from epic songs gathered across the Mymensingh district of then Eastern Bengal. The primary collector was Chandra Kumar De, a local literary activist. Sen went on to publish three more volumes of balladic texts from different parts of Eastern Bengal. The response was enthusiastic, but some scholars grew suspicious: the ballads were, they felt, simply too polished to be genuine folk material of any real antiquity.
Zbavitel found that skepticism deeply regrettable. He confined his analysis to 41 ballads from Mymensingh, covering more than 21,000 verses, and worked through each one to establish their originality. His key argument was that the ballads were not collected by a single person, yet they share identical images, similar artistic approaches, and a common inventory of similes and metaphors. That consistency, he argued, could not be the work of a single modern forger.
What Zbavitel found most striking was the ballads’ complete absence of religious bias. They show Hindus and Muslims living alongside each other without friction, and most of the Hindu ballads were actually collected from Muslim singers. This secular character sets the gitikas sharply apart from classical Bangla literary texts like the Mangal-kavyas and Vaishnava literature, which carry explicit religious content.
The dominant theme running through the ballads is love, even in the historical and heroic epics. The writers kept their language simple, rooted in country scenes and feelings, and drew freely on the poetic traditions of their predecessors rather than chasing novelty. Preservation was oral, which meant ballads were sometimes rewritten by later folk poets, with passages replaced or stories altered, often to offer listeners what the new poet considered a better version.
Rabindranath Tagore, writing to Dineshchandra Sen, described the Maimansimha-gitika as “a source of exuberance from the deepest level of the heart of rural Bengal, a clear stream of genuine pain,” contrasting it with the classical texts he likened to artificially dug ponds. Zbavitel’s study, the article argues, remains an invaluable guide for anyone undertaking serious research into Bangladesh’s folk heritage.