When Dr. Sen asked me to write a Preface, I was diffident. My knowledge of Bengali is minimal by attending irregularly the classes of Dr. Mahidas Bhattacharya and Mrs. Asha Bhattacharya in the International School of Dravidian Linguistics. When I read through the few pages, I found the going good.
The two ancient texts Carya and Doha were the basis of analysis. Textual variations and other alterations like the ones made by Sukumar Sen are examined and accepted.
The wide reading of the author especially in Indo-Aryan languages and German languages has enriched his statements on old Bengali in several places.
The style of presentation is so fascinating that one is tempted to complete the reading of the book rather than leave it midway.
Dr. Sen belongs to the second generation. His father Prof. Sukumar Sen and his son are well-known philologists. A three-generation scholar-family in the same house is now looking closely at the Bengali language and its history.
Dr. Sen could have given a dictionary of the words ancient and modern so that the reader can locate the changes. In the next edition, we hope he will do this.
It is the work of a dedicated Scholar who is the son of a well-known Indologist and the father of a budding Indologist.
1. Bengali is a member of the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian or Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. With its next of kin Assamese and Oriya, Bengali constitutes a close-knit linguistic group. The language shades off into its sister-languages Oriya, Magahi and Maithili in the west and into Assamese in the north-east. 2 Thus the languages Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Maithili, Magahi and Bhojpuri constitute the Magadhan group of New Indo-Aryan.
Bengali along with Assamese and Oriya constitute the eastern sub-group of the Magadhan family while Magahi, Maithili and Bhojpuri form the western sub-group. Bengali is spoken in West Bengal, Tripura, in parts of Assam particularly in the Barak valley, parts of Jharkhand and Bihar in India, and in Bangladesh. Bengali is the national language of Bangladesh. Spoken approximately by 171 million native speakers living in India and Bangladesh the Bengali language ranks fifth in order among the languages of the World.
Like every other written language with a sufficiently long history Bengali is chronologically divided into three periods: old, middle and modern (or new).5 Old Bengali stage covers roughly a peric period of two hundred and fifty years from circa 950 A.D. to circa 1200 A.D. The upper limit of the time scale includes the lower fringe of the earlier period that includes the transitional phase between the last stage of Middle Indo-Aryan and the early stage of New Indo-Aryan. This transitory linguistic stage may tentatively be labelled as the Proto-Bengali stage. Middle Bengali stage covers the next six centuries (circa 1200 A.D. to circa 1800 A.D.). Here too we come across a snag The destabilizing and destructive impact of the Turkish invasion during the 13th and the 14th centuries left a yawning gap in the history of Bengali language and literature. There is not a shred of any surviving literary or linguistic specimen belonging to this period that can throw any light on the state of the language at that critical point of linguistic development. Consequently what was the state of the language and of the literature at that chaotic period covering the final phase of Old Bengali and the initial phase of Middle Bengali remains in the terminology of crime literature a locked room mystery.
By communis opinio Modern (or New) Bengali period begins from 1801 A.D. The reason for fixing this particular year as the watershed is the introduction of the printing press. From 1801 printed texts started to replace, slowly but steadily, the handwritten manuscripts. By untiring and Herculean efforts Sir Charles Wilkins had already succeeded in casting moveable Bengali types. In this venture Wilkins was helped by his assistant Panchanan Karmakar (d. 1802). After the Hooghly Press (1778) the Baptist Mission Press was set up in Serampore on the Hooghly (1800). From this press was published the Bengali versions of the great Indian epics the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bengali translation of the Gospels. Ergo Bengali literature entered the print era. And there was no looking back. The colonial enterprise, the missionary activities, strongly and steadily supported by the rapidly growing urbane Bengali intelligentsia despite some opposition both the conservatives and reformationists albeit not for the same reasons converged to make Bengali prose the most popular and influential medium of literary activity and intellectual discourse. The newly inducted western knowledge expanded the intellectual horizon of the English knowing Bengalis and they in their turn made full use of the Bengali prose as the percolator of the new knowledge of science and philosophy. Later Bankim Chandra Chatterji described this as 'the filtering down process'. The emerging Bengali prose became the most potent agency for the purpose of dissemination of Western science and philosophy 16. (Here the role of the different magazines cannot be gainsaid.) Interestingly however the introduction of the printing press in Serampore and almost simultaneously in Calcutta did not signal the end of the trade and the art of the manuscript writing. The hand written manuscripts continued to be used till the early decades of the 19th century. The manuscript form was particularly popular among the devout aristocratic as well as the fashionable noveaux riches urban and suburban Vaishnavites. They preferred to have their own favourite religious texts in the manuscript form. This proclivity in its turn left its stamp on the printing press. Consequently it became fashionable to print religious texts in the manuscript form. Some were even sold unbound. Interestingly some of the Sanskrit religious texts as well as Bengali ritual texts like vratas used almost regularly both by the domestic priests and the rural and urban women folk are even today printed in the manuscript form.
2. The surviving scanty Old Bengali material comes from three different sources namely epigraphical, lexical and literary. Here samples of the first two categories are given. The epigraphical sources are the inscriptions and old books. From this source are found place names (e.g. Khatapara) and some stray words (e.g. buttika 'score' = Modern Bengali buri '20'). 13 The lexical source is a thirteenth century commentary (Tikasravasva) of the Sanskrit lexicon (Amarakosa) prepared by a Bengali Brahmin lexicographer Sarvananda14. In this lexicon are found some four hundred odd vocables (e.g. osara 'width of cloth', khota 'beak of a bird', pimpidi; 'ant', jhampana 'palanquin', picchodhi 'rheum of eye' etc). The third and the most important source is the collection of the Carya songs.
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