PROBLEMS IN BENGALI LITERARY HISTORIOGRAPHY 57 values which the narrator considers to be relevant to his/her society. Counter-canons Ulso have specific agendas, and are not free from the ideological biases that more or less infiltrate all human discourse whatsoever. AsPrankKermodeputit: "Canons are essentially strategic constructs by which societies maintain their own interests" (Kennode 1979). My interest here is in examining the nature of some of these "strategies" in order to see the cultural politics inherent in them and also to examine some of the ways in which the term "literature" (s^hitya in Sanskrit and Bengali) is constituted according to the ideological inclinations of the writer. This is not to say that these historians of literature were always conscious of their inclinations, which appeared to them as "objective" evaluations of "facts" that had been misinterpreted earlier by other historians. The cultural heritage of India before the consolidation of the British empire was of an essentially composite texture, a mix of the oral, the performative, and the written forms of expression. Constituencies and audiences undoubtedly differed, but there was a large degree of overlap which permitted flexibility and obliteration of rigid boundaries. The modern Indian languages or the regional languages came into existence some time in and around the tenth century, whereas literary historiography in these was not seriously undertaken until much later. Texts circulated in various forms among the people, but there was no serious effort to sift, categorize, or evaluate them in order to form a canon of representation. The social formation of pro-British Bengal (and this may be true of other regional languages in India) supported the flexibility and the mixing of forms of literary expressions without restricting the domain of "literature" to any particular category of texts. The Sanskrit term for literature is sahitya, a term that has been taken over in many modem Indian languages as well. Put simply, it means the "joining together" of word ^abda) and sense (artha). This togetherness of sound and sense was largely available in the kQvya literature of Sanskrit, and according to Nagendra (1987:144-45), the term sahitya is used almost synonymously ^ith kavya or poetry in general. All texts were classified on the basis of the possible relationships of these t,wo, word and sense.1 In pro-modern Bengali literature however, there does not seem to be any great concern about what exactly constituted the domain of the "literary," and the entire range of human verbal expression was available to audiences of various kinds according to their specific demands. This is why the epics, ballads, lyrics, religious/devotional texts, and even the very earthy mangalakavyas circulated freely in a space that could be shared by anyone living in that society. The Bengali language, as has already been mentioned, started taking shape