i was having a discussion with a friend yesterday, and eventually we ended upon the peculiarities of the history of the bengali language and its literary production. in The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier the author reports that in fact the muslim afghans rulers of bengal patronized bengali as a language of high culture to a far greater extent than their predecessors, the hindu senas, who supported sanskrit. during the mughal period there was a shift to languages like persian and urdu. by the 19th century bengali cultural production became associated with the hindu upper classes, and an elite muslim identity that was self-consciously bengali speaking was a new force which interposed itself between the urdu speaking muslim cultural elite and bengali speaking hindu cultural elite.