I am very pleased and honoured to have been asked to write a brief foreword to this excellent work by my colleague Mrs Dipali Ghosh, for I am sure the book will be useful. A great deal of hard work and dedication has gone into its making, quite outside Mrs Ghosh's normal duties as the librarian in charge of the Oriental Reading Room in the British Library's Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books.
The book is a bibliographical guide to the contacts between two influential literary cultures. The British, servants of the East India Company, first came to Bengal in the seventeenth century when Job Charnock founded the now great metropolitan centre of Calcutta-soon to celebrate its tercentenary. The relationship between the two cultures was fruitful and close and Bengali students were among those most attracted to and influenced by Western ideas and educational methods. Indeed the Bengali renaissance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries might well be said to have been sparked off by the British. Bengal first adopted Western culture and its people became influential throughout India serving the British Raj and the great commercial trading empires.
Bengalis are known as volatile, creative and irrepressible and the number of books listed here is sufficient testimony to that. Writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Rammohan Roy and other are known world-wide. Mrs Ghosh has tracked down the translations of their work into English and listed them for easy reference.
The materials in the bibliography have been gathered, sifted and organised for this edition. It is completely a new revised and enlarged edition, and updated up to 2002. The first edition was published from London in 1986, and after that many more books have been translated but no up-to-date bibliography is available. In this edition the most of the errors which occurred in the first edition have been eliminated.
The main purpose of publishing this second edition is that the people are now taking more interest in learning Bengali language, and in snooding getting acquainted with the Bengali culture, but they are handicapped for not being able to read or write text in the original language, hence, the English translations have made it possible for them to know about the literature and culture of Bengal.. It is the National language of Bangladesh and the regional language of India, West Bengal - is widely spoken all over India and abroad. This sort of bibliographical tool is very important to any rich literary culture. The bibliography contains 1408 items and includes monographs as well as contributions to books and translations appearing as articles in periodicals. It is arranged by broad subject headings, and within each subject alphabetically by author, and under each author alphabetically by title. Authors' names are given as they appear in the text, only in some cases where the author's name is written in different style and spelt differently in different text, then the standardisation of name is maintained throughout.
The each entry contains the following elements: author, editor, translator, illustrator, title, edition statement, imprint and collation. Annotation has also been added where necessary. Author and title indexes are provided at the end of the text.
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