Bengali Culture Over a Thousand Years by Ghulam Murshid

Author:Ghulam Murshid
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789386906120
Publisher: Niyogi Books
Published: 2018-08-09T22:00:00+00:00

The sudden flowering of Bengali prose came at a price. Not only were Arabic and Farsi words weeded out, as far as possible, in the tradition of written language that developed in the 19th century, the simple sentence structures also took on more complex forms. A comparison of the law books translated by Forster with personal letters that have survived from the years narrowly preceding them will show how the kind of Sanskritisation promoted by Forster made the language difficult and removed it from the tongue actually spoken by the people. Long, complex sentences with multiple clauses are used in Forster’s translations. Juxtaposing the two writing styles, we can say that until the 18th century Bengali sentence structures were generally simple, and the style followed the spoken language. From the time of Jonathan Duncan and Henry Forster, however, sentences became long and compound, and the style bookish. Thus the written language branched off from the spoken language and became quite different. Admittedly, however, the language could not but change at this time in keeping with the changing realities and ideas that it was required to express.

The Language Thrives

Bengali prose came into its own in response to the demands of a new age and a new way of life. The British brought new thoughts, new ideas and new kinds of work to the land. The kind of language that was now in demand to deal with these new realities had not formerly existed. The conditions that would make this language a necessity did not exist in pre-colonial times and the contexts that made this language necessary had not existed in everyday lives. But when a heretofore unknown prose was called for in society, in government jobs, in educational efforts, in the new print media, and in the business of everyday life, a virtually new language had to be ‘midwived’. Consequently, in the decades between the 1780s and the publication of the first modern Bengali novel (Bankimchandra’s Durgeshnandini, also probably the first novel in any modern Indian language) in 1865, Bengali prose went through a veritable revolution. This long road from Jonanthan Duncan to Bankimchandra’s arrival in Bengali literature might have measured only 80 years in the human calendar, but the two limits of this short period are separated by a light year if measured by the linguistic transformation that was achieved in it. The change happened in phases, a step at a time, and it did not take place at the hands of any single individual. It came about in part through the efforts of Forster and Carey, in part through the writings of Ram Mohan Roy and his contemporaries, a little again at the hands of the Derozians, and then through the writings of Ishwar Gupta, Vidyasagar, Akshay Datta, and then again in Peary Chand Mitra’s Alaler Gharer Dulal (‘The Spoilt Son’; published in 1858; claimed by some scholars to be the first Bengali novel, written in a language that was close to the spoken tongue), and in Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (‘Sketches of Hutom the Owl’).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.