There is no modesty or shame in this city: What Bengalis Heard in Colonial Burma, c. 1900

In 1903, a Bengali poet named Najir Ali published a thirteen-page poem called Reṅguner Kābýakabitā, which might be (very) loosely translated as “Ballad of Rangoon.”¹ In this lively composition, Najir Ali related his experiences of the Burmese port city (now Yangon), evocatively describing shipyards and sweet shops, and passionately recounting the trials of seductive women and the tribulations of bloody riots. He told his tale in a specific dialect of Bengali, known as Musulmāni or Dobhaṣī Bāṅglā, a form of the language that lent itself to Islamicate allusions and vocabularies drawn from Arabic and Persian (D’Hubert 2018b; Bose 2014). Although