Bengali Language & Literature

Independent India resolved to maximize the deployment of its own languages in public domains where English alone was in use. This paper considers the case of higher education in Bangla, and focuses on the introduction and dissemination of appropriate technical terms. In this context, the paper argues that the development of terminological carriers of modernity needs to be seen not as a spinoff of the general practices of development or modernization, but as central to it. It is argued here that the task of coming up with appropriate technical terms needs to be turned into an opportunity to decolonize our minds and our practices. The phrase ‘decolonize our minds’ in this abstract, of course, invokes later writings. The paper was presented in 1982, without any abstract.

.  The problems of irreducibility, untranslatability, non-generalized existence of language are there as there persists always something irreducible in the interactions between the self and the other. Considering the Bengali society, perspectivally deliberated through the intellectual lenses of the bourgeois, the self-culture predicates the normative paradigm that structures what should and what should not constitute the essential with regard to socio-political identity. The conflictual cultural implication opposes whatever is non-standard and heterogeneous. Even within the group, the notion of the ‘other-self’ segregates the cultural variants that are marginalized as non-standard and imperfect.

Osman living in a rooftop room dreams of his father’s death but finds himself in a distorted fact no less horrible. All he witnesses sometime seem hallucination sometime real. It’s a time when receiving news of someone’s being shot dead appear normal to Osman. The environs reflect situation of mass suffocation pressed under hideous images of late sixties Bangladesh, the then East Pakistan. Osman’s personal life reveals as abnormal, so does the public life. Even lamenting upon a dear one’s odd death is as if restricted. “It’s risky to answer” of any normal query! The first chapter of Elias’ Rooftop Soldier engulfs the readers with inner happenings of atypical socio-political state of pre-liberation Bengali life depicted with the unique language and style. The following translated piece from one of the best classic fiction of Bangla literature will surely be an astounding experience for world’s literature lovers.

The paper discusses the issues faced while evaluating the different aspects of mapping language specific data onto the IMAGACT interface. The paper is a result of working on the IMAGACT project under the supervision of Prof. Girish Nath Jha of the School of Sanskrit and Indic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. IMAGACT is an initiative of a consortium (namely University of Florence, ILC-CNR, Pisa and University of Siena) funded in Italy. It has been designed on corpus-based annotation by mother-tongue linguists. Beginning with English and Italian speech corpora, a substantial amount of variation of action-oriented lexicons across multiple action concepts was noticed.

A seminar, accompanied by exhibitions and follow up field initiatives are planned in order to prepare the ground for a further Bengal Renaissance, for the regeneration of the best and finest in Bengali, Indian and global traditions of humanity.

Bringing together scholars from across the disciplines of social and intellectual history, philology, theology, and anthropology to systematically investigate Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal, the book highlights the significant roles—religious, social, and cultural—that a prominent Hindu devotional current played in the lives of wide and diverse sections of colonial Bengali society.

Publisher's abstract:
Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel’s state-of-the-art history navigates the extraordinary twists and turns that created modern Bangladesh through ecological disaster, colonialism, partition, a war of independence and cultural renewal. In this revised and updated edition, Van Schendel offers a fascinating and highly readable account of life in Bangladesh over the last two millennia. Based on the latest academic research and covering the numerous historical developments of the 2010s, he provides an eloquent introduction to a fascinating country and its resilient and inventive people. A perfect survey for travellers, expats, students and scholars alike.

Table of Contents

List of Plates
List of Maps and Figures
Acknowledgements
Timeline
Preface to second edition

Introduction
Part I. The Long View
1. A land of water and silt
2. Jungle, fields, cities and states
3. A region of multiple frontiers
4. The delta as a crossroads

Part II. Colonial Encounters
5. From the Mughal empire to the British empire
6. British legacies
7. A closing agrarian frontier
8. Colonial conflicts
9. Towards Partition
10. Partition
11. Population exchange

Part III. Becoming East Pakistan
12. The Pakistan experiment
13. Pakistan falls apart
14. East Pakistani livelihoods
15. The roots of aid dependence
16. A new elite and cultural renewal

Part IV. War and the Birth of Bangladesh
17. Armed conflict
18. A state is born
19. Imagining a new nation

Part V. Independent Bangladesh
20. Shaping a political system
21. The triumph of identity politics
22. Transnational linkages
23. Boom or bust?
24. Gender movements
25. A national culture?
Conclusions

Bangladesh district maps
Key political figures since 1947
Glossary of Bengali terms
Notes
Bibliography
Index


Links:
https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/history-bangladesh-2nd-edition?format=PB


https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/history-bangladesh-2nd-edition?format=PB


https://books.google.se/books?id=Io7mDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR4&dq=bangladesh+history+2020&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjf4pi6v8LqAhWy5KYKHaftB80Q6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

It is a great credit of the Bengali nation that the world has celebrated the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate Bengali Poet. As readers, how much do we know about Rabindranath? We do not know more about the world famous poet, as huge information about him are unknown to us till date. As the foremost poet of Bangla language, the occasion of receiving Nobel by Rabindranath is a past event of hundred years. In the then magazines and newspapers of different countries, there had been an enormous announcement about his life and literature, but the very little part of such publication was retrieved and got back with the hard endeavor of many aficionados and lovers of the world famed poet. Due to rapid development of modern information and technology, those unknown information is being unveiled to the readers of the world. Subrata Kumar Das, an eminent essayist and a very information-technology-loving man has given his utmost effort to include such old-fashioned information in this book ‘Rabindranath: Kom-jana, Ojana’.

The phenomenon of reversing with respect to Compound Verbs in Hindi is an interesting avenue to check for linguistic processing effects. However, if the same phenomenon is replicated in Bangla, the results are totally different with respect to the consequent set of verbal constructions. In Hindi, reversing the polar and the vector components does not shift the semantic focus. The meaning comes from the same component even after reversing. But in Bangla, in most cases such a reversal makes the resultant sentence unacceptable. These reversals make the sentences incorrect as the polar positioning of the vector is incompatible for that particular sentence or for all sentences in general. In certain acceptable cases, the vector becomes an instrumental case marker in the reversed construction. So, while checking for the acceptability of such reversals in a self-paced reading paradigm, some latency effects are noticed.

This article is very much an excursion into methodology and possible new avenues for the study of Tantra. It will consider
recent insights from the growing field of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), especially the modern conceptual metaphor theory developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and ‘conceptual blending theory’, a more-recent method crafted by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. We will apply their ideas such as ‘conceptual integration networks’, ‘cross-domain
mapping’, ‘emergent structure’, and ‘blended worlds’ to the consideration of Hindu Tantric visualization sequences, generation of the ‘yogic body’, and the ‘remembrance’ of one’s ‘forgotten’ cosmic essence as a type of anamnesis (‘reverse amnesia’). We will examine beliefs, practices, and texts from the
Vaisnava Sahajiya Tantric traditions of 16th to 19th century greater Bengal.  I argue that these new CSR methods can help us to illuminate the vivid and imaginative worlds and processes found in the highly esoteric Vaisnava Sahajiya traditions, and may be useful to the study of religion in general.

The following essay describes the various steps and results of the re-search that I conducted among the Bangladeshi immigrants living in Rome. The research is aimed at the creation of a wordlist to compile an essential bengali-italian dictionary for the linguistic needs of bengali speakers in Italy. Here I will present the method of lexical selection – suitable for any immigration language - that led to the final wordlist of 3500 words divided into semantic fields. In the second section, the lexical selection made by the Bengali interviewees is interpreted in a sociolinguistic and cultural perspective. The vocabulary that bengali speakers have suggested as more useful for their communication in the country of immigration differs consistently from the one comprehended in the bengali-italian and bengali-english dictionaries written so far. It also reflects some peculiar elements of the cultural and emotional life of the Bangladeshi community in Italy, that will be described in the final section of this work.

In the Shade of the Golden Palace explores the work of the prolific Bengali poet Ālāol (fl. 1651-71), who translated five narrative poems and one versified treatise from medieval Hindi and Persian into Bengali. The book maps the genres, structures, and themes of Ālāol's works, paying special attention to his discourse on poetics and his literary genealogy, which included Sanskrit, Avadhi, Maithili, Persian, and Bengali authors. D'Hubert focuses on courtly speech in Ālāol’s poetry, his revisiting of classical categories in a vernacular context, and the prominent role of performing arts in his conceptualization of the poetics of the written word. The foregrounding of this audacious theory of meaning in Ālāol’s poetry is a crucial contribution of the book, both in terms of general conceptual analysis and for its significance in the history of Bengali poetry.

This book shows how multilingual literacy fostered a variety of literary experiments in the remote kingdom of Arakan, which lay between present-day southeastern Bangladesh and Myanmar, in the mid-17th century. D'Hubert also presents a detailed analysis of Middle Bengali narrative poems, as well as translations of Old Maithili, Brajabuli, and Middle Bengali lyric poems that illustrate the major poetic styles in the regional courts of eastern South Asia. In the Shade of the Golden Palace therefore fulfills three functions: it is a unique guide for readers of Middle Bengali poetry, a detailed study of the cultural history of the frontier region of Arakan, and an original contribution to the poetics of South Asian literatures.

Ashok Shahane is one of the very important figures in the publishing of Marathi literature, both in terms of his involvement in the little magazine movement, and through the Bombay publishing house Pras Prakashan, which has brought out the work of many of the most significant Marathi writers. In this interview, conducted in Marathi in 2015 and 2016, and translated into English by his interviewer Anjali Nerlekar, he describes his admiration for Bengali literature and his early ventures in magazine publishing in Bombay in the 1960s. He goes on to discuss his collaborations with Bhalchandra Nemade and Arun Kolatkar, his own work as a literary critic, and his association with Allen Ginsberg during and after the American poet’s 1962 visit to India. Shahane also discusses his little magazine Aso, and the work of Pras Prakashan.

For more than a month even the most atheists of Bengal have been praying for the recovery of the beloved legend Soumitra Chatterjee, hoping for a miracle. People's heart skipped a beat when on 15th November 2020, they received the news of the demise of the iconic personality, a news which they have been dreading to hear. Bengalis all over the world felt an insuperable sense of loss, a vacuum that is unbearable. Soumitra Chatterjee is a symbol of all the qualities that a progressive Bengali should encompass but is failing due to the hollow imitation of modernization of the west. He showed us the value of nourishing and respecting our own traditions and culture, yet have an insatiable zeal to know more, to embrace new ideas, have an open mind for liberal thoughts and, above all, faith in humanity. In spite of numerous personal disturbances including physical and mental health issues, he proved to every Bengali, every Indian at large, how to live a rich life. This article is a small attempt to capture Soumitra Chatterjee’s deep personality that goes beyond his role as an actor. Intentionally rejecting the path of stardom that every actor seeks, he chose a path less travelled, less popular, and perhaps that indeed made a lot of difference. With his collaboration with Ray, Chatterjee participated in the Indian New Wave films that gave Bengal a global recognition. The article is a peek into vast aesthetic spirit that is not just restricted to motion pictures. Bengal did not just lose a great actor that brought realism into fictional films, but also lost a gifted painter, a remarkable poet, a charming elocutionist, a brilliant thespian and, above all, a noble human.

The paper investigates how reaction time findings, from a self-paced reading experiment that exposes native Bangla speakers to Bangla sentences containing conjunct verbs, can provide cues about the processing of such light verb constructions. Psycholinguistic processing takes into account two components: the mental representation of the category of conjunct verbs in Bangla, and the manner in which its knowledge is situationally and discursively retrieved to address linguistic needs during comprehension in agreement with the context. Reaction time is directly proportional to the processing cost of a particular sentential construction. Higher the reaction time, higher is the difficulty faced by the participant to process a certain sentential construction, which could be due to a semantic aberration, a syntactic anomaly or an unacceptable construction.

Madhavendra Puri, who was the parama-guru of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, remains an enigma. Though he has been mentioned as the seedling of prema-bhakti that was central to the Chaitanya sampradaya, very little is known about him. This essay tries to explore the Vaishnava accounts, especially the Chaitanyacharitamrita, in order to establish Madhavendra Puri as the predecessor of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu from the perspective of the Kirtana - as an aesthetic and as a movement.

‘আট বছর’ আগের একদিন’ কবিতা নিয়ে বিস্তর আলোচনা হয়েছে। এ লেখাটি আরেকটি আলোচনা মাত্র। যাকে সাহিত্যের ভাষায় শিল্পরীতি বলা হয়, আলোচনাটা প্রাথমিকভাবে সে গোত্রের। তবে, ‘কবিভাষা’র দিকে এ আলোচনায় বিশেষ মনোযোগ দেয়া হয়েছে। কবিতার পাঠটি এক অর্থে ‘নিওক্রিটিক’ ঘরানার, যদিও পরবর্তী একশ বছরের অনেকগুলো পাঠপদ্ধতি টুকরা-টাকরাভাবে ঢুকে পড়েছে আলোচনায়।

Bangladesh is a new name for an old land whose history is little known to the wider world. A country chiefly famous in the West for media images of poverty, underdevelopment, and natural disasters, Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's history reveals the country's vibrant, colourful past and its diverse culture as it navigates the extraordinary twists and turns that have created modern Bangladesh. The story begins with the early geological history of the delta which has decisively shaped Bangladesh society. The narrative then moves chronologically through the era of colonial rule, the partition of Bengal, the war with Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh as an independent state. In so doing, it reveals the forces that have made Bangladesh what it is today. This is an eloquent introduction to a fascinating country and its resilient and inventive people.

    Through the past to the present: a leading scholar traces Bengal's history to explain modern Bangladesh
    Includes aids for students such as a chronology, biographies of key political figures, a glossary and maps
    Features over 110 images that bring Bangladesh to life

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Fireflies was first published by the Macmillan Company. Let us remember that Macmillan was one of the first ones who brought the English books by the first Non-European Nobel laureate in England in cheaper editions, after India Society. The company’s New York branch published Fireflies in 1928 with Artzybasheff’s worthy works.

À l’occasion de la célébration du bicentenaire de la première chaire de sanskrit au Collège de France, ces journées d’études se proposent de revenir sur la figure d’Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (1773-1832) qui en fut le premier titulaire et par là-même le premier enseignant officiel de cette langue en Europe. Il s’agira de resituer son œuvre dans le contexte plus général de l’orientalisme européen à une époque où celui-ci s’institutionnalise. Membre fondateur de la Société Asiatique de Paris, chargé des collections orientales de la Bibliothèque Nationale, il fut un interlocuteur  privilégié pour tous les savants étrangers qui venaient à Paris se former aux langues orientales et consulter les sources manuscrites. Contemporain de Silvestre de Sacy, d’Abel-Rémusat, des frères Schlegel en Allemagne, de Colebrooke en Angleterre, il contribua activement à ériger les études sanskrites en une discipline autonome, notamment vis-à-vis des études persanes. Ces journées d’études rassembleront des indianistes et des historiens des sciences de différents pays. Elles aborderont quatre axes principaux : la situation des études sanskrites au sein de l’orientalisme, l’œuvre indianiste de Chézy, ses réseaux européens, la postérité de son enseignement.

The novel Chilekothar Sepai (1987), written by Akhtaruzzaman Elias is a noteworthy literary piece in Bangla language based on pre-liberation political history of Bangladesh, that is, the context of mass revolt in 1969. Crossing the boundary of Bangladesh and West Bengal, the novel has been included in the academic curriculum of Bangla Language and Literature under the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations in the University of Chicago in America. Matthew D. Rich, a PhD researcher of Anthropology in the same university analyzed the Text of this novel for American students and consequently became felt strong urge of translating this great piece. His translation work is in fact going on. His translation of 20th Chapter of Chilekothar Sepai (Rooftop Soldier) along with the Preamble of this translation work in both Bangla and English has been randomly chosen for publishing here.

A language is considered as a sexist language if it conveys attitudes that stereotype a person according to gender rather than judging on individual merits. Feminists believe that English language is a sexist language because it involves negative attitudes towards women and maintains social inequalities between men and women. There are many English metaphors used to describe women in disagreeable manner, but this is rarely a case with men. Animal, food and villainous imageries are highly used to refer to women, such as: bitch, chick,-sugar, honey, tomato,-witch and so on. Animal imageries compare women with helpless creatures, food imageries with items used for sustenance and pleasure, and villainous imageries with evil creatures. More or less, in every society, women are believed to be weak and subordinate to men who are considered to be masculine. Even by linguistic items, men are presented as the head of societies. English morphology generally takes the male form as the base form, and adds suffix to construct the female form, for example: lion-lioness, tiger-tigress, actor-actress, etc. Suffix 'ess' carries connotations of lack of seriousness. By using the words 'he' and 'man' as generic forms, women are kept invisible and undermined. My first language is Bengali, so it was a question as to whether my language is also a sexist one. Sexism is also a usual feature of Bengali language, and even a careless observation on daily language can help identify the presence of sexism in Bengali. Women are sometimes referred by the following villainous imageries: Rakkhoshi (রাক্ষসী) = female monster; daini (ডাইনী) = witch. Even in terms of morphology, male form appears to be the base form in Bengali language, such as: chakor-chakrani (চাকর-চাকরানী) = servant-maidservant, shingho-shinghi (সসিংহ-সসিংহী) = lion-lioness, etc. Even names of Bengali children follow sexism; a male child is never named Nodi (নদী) = river and a female child is never named Shagor (সাগর) = sea. Even by means of names, men are presented as a strong figure and women as the subordinate figures who possess lesser strength comparing to their opposite gender. From the above discussion, it is obvious that both Bengali and English are sexist languages; delve into your language to discover sexism in your language.

On December 7, 2018, I was honored to deliver the Tarun Mitra Memorial Lecture, co-sponsored by the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta. My thanks to all who turned out and asked such great questions!