Radha still waits in Sunamganj...

On the night before a Hindu wedding in the haor country of Sylhet, the courtyard fills. Women arrive in twos and threes, saris tucked at the waist, and nobody announces a beginning. Someone claps once. Another answers.

By the time the circle closes there is only the sound of palms and one voice leading, the others taking each line back from her half a beat late.

The form is called Dhamail, and its words belong to Radha and Krishna. Radha waits, Krishna has gone. Nothing in that is local to Sylhet. Vaishnava devotion crossed Bengal for centuries and brought its own landscape along, the Yamuna and the kadamba tree. In Sylhet that landscape loosened.

Dhamail turns up at Jhulan and Rash Jatra, at Holi and at a child's first rice, but the night before a wedding is where it lives, in Hindu households especially, the national heritage inventory says.

The man credited with shaping the form is Radharaman Dutta, born in 1833 in Keshabpur village, now part of Jagannathpur upazila in Sunamganj. He was the youngest son of the poet Radha Madhab Dutta and grew up on scripture and verse. Arkum Shah is sometimes named beside him, so the credit is shared, though Radharaman is called the father of Dhamail.

Accounts of his life add that his wife and three of his four children died before him, leaving only a son, Bipin Bihari. He died on 10 November 1915, in his own house, which became his shrine.

He wrote in Sylheti. Standard Bengali tends to file that speech under rustic; a Sylheti ear hears the voice that bargains over fish at the ghat. Theology reached Bengal in Sanskrit and verse. Here it arrives in the register of an afternoon, and that changes who can carry it.

A verse in borrowed words has to be studied. In one's own words it comes the way a lullaby does, from the edge of other people's work.

Many of the songs close by naming their maker. 'Bhaibe Radharaman bole', the closing line runs, and the inventory calls the sound of it inseparable from the form. Naming the composer at the close is an old Bengali habit, and Sushama Das, the Ekushey Padak-winning singer of Sylhet, noticed when it was dropped.

In January 2018, according to an account on The Travelling Archive, she listened to a recording of a Radharaman song and said the singer had muddled the verses and left his name off the end. Asked to sing it as Dhamail instead, she laughed and sang a few lines.

Radharaman left no written collection of his songs, according to the same inventory. Professor Jatindra Mohan Bhattacharya is credited with starting the effort to gather them. A Calcutta volume holds 696 songs, and a 1971 compilation by Chowdhury Golam Akbar, 'Radharaman Sangeet', came out through the literary society of Madan Mohan College in Sylhet.

Other accounts credit him with more than two thousand. Between those figures lies everything nobody wrote down, the lines women learned on one wedding eve and carried to the next. The circle did the work of an archive. Each singer corrected the last by ear. A great-grandson, Animesh Bijoy Chowdhury, organising secretary of the Radharaman Smriti Tarpan, is trying to collect the songs in their original tunes and words.

Sunamganj, where Radharaman was born, is haor country, and each monsoon it stops being land. Fields vanish under water that runs to the horizon, and villages turn into islands where boats do the work of feet. A man gone to the market town cannot walk home.

Separation here has a depth, measured against the plinth of the house. Families wait on the sky as well. In some years an early flash flood out of the hills takes the boro harvest in a night, and they stand at the edge of the field and watch the water come.

The songs of separation, the inventory adds, outnumber the rest of his work. Speakers at a memorial programme in Sunamganj, reported by BSS, described the songs as holding two things at once: the ache of Krishna's absence and a mystical search for the divine within the human body.

Both readings hold, but a haor courtyard would feel the first before anyone explained it, because Radha at the riverbank was never an abstraction to women who had watched rivers climb their own steps. The song gave it a tune.

A circle has no front. No one sings at an audience, and the leader is whoever's turn it is. Take 'Ashbe Shyamkalia, kunjo sajao giya'. Radha is weeping, and her sakhis, her women friends, ask why she is crying like a madwoman. Then they turn to the grove: flowers to gather, garlands to string, because he will come, flute in hand. The song is a circle consoling someone inside it, which is what a courtyard does when it sings it.

Collections give it in more than one version, and the versions disagree on the words, as songs kept by ear do. A woman who cannot say 'I miss him' beside the cooking fire can sing Radha's line in front of the courtyard, and nobody will call it hers. Devotion lends her cover, and the clapping carries the rest, because a grief sounded out by a dozen throats is no longer one person's to hold.

Festivals carry Radharaman to Dhaka. The Shilpakala Academy has hosted a three-day Radharaman Sangeet Utsab, and a student group, SURMA, took his songs and the dance to the TSC auditorium at Dhaka University in 2008. The audience beyond the haors is real, and the form has gained a name.

A stage has a front, though, and a circle turned outward is a different thing. At home, some weddings bring the sound system before they bring the singers.

Sushama Das died in March 2025, at home in Sylhet. At Keshabpur, in the house that became Radharaman's shrine, a candle is said to be lit every day, a habit his disciples began after his death. The courtyard keeps no such roster.

It has whoever turns up that night, and whichever of them knows how the next line goes.

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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer based in Bangladesh