| Bengali - From The Heart Of The Ganga |
| Perhaps the Indian language with the most profound of literary associations, Bengali (or "Bangla") traces its origins back several centuries. This article traces the path this influential language has taken down the ages. |
| One of the earliest historical references on Bengal found is the mention of a land named Gangaridai by the Greeks around 100 BC. The word "Bengal" is speculated to have come from "Gangahrd" (Land with the Ganges in its heart), thus identifying the region and the people inhabiting the region. |
| Today, the language spoken by the people of Bengal, called Bengali, is the most commonly known language spoken in India after Hindi, with over 207 million speakers spread over the world. Bengali etymologically belongs to the Eastern Magadhan branch of the Indo-Aryan language family, along with Assamese, Oriya and Maithili. The mutual illegibility of these four languages are suggestive of common roots and demonstrate display a marked similarity in terms of structure, ordering and sound. |
| The Bengali alphabet is written using a Brahmic script similar to the Devanagari script used for Hindi and Sanskrit. The alphabet is a syllabic cursive alphabet with 12 vowels and 52 consonants. All consonants have an inherent embedded vowel sound. Vowels can be expressed using a variety of options. They can be written as independent letters, or they can be expressed by using a variety of diacritical marks written above, below, before or after the consonant they are associated with. Additional diacritic marks are also used to change (or suppress) the embedded vowel sound of consonant. Consonant clusters are sometimes indicated by ligating two or more symbols. The Bengali script is also used for writing Assamese with a few minor modifications. |
| However, until the 18th century, Bengali existed as a collection of varying dialects with varying grammarian principles. But scholars, both European and native, have rigorously worked out the grammar of Bengali under the common principles these dialects shared. The first written set of Bengali grammarian rules was executed between 1734 and 1742 by Manoel da Assumpcam, a Portuguese missionary serving in Bhawal titled "Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes". However, a British grammarian, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, is credited as being the first to script Bengali grammar using Bangla texts and letters for illustration titled "A Grammar of the Bengal Language" in 1778. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the great Bengali reformer, also published a book titled "Grammar of the Bengali Language" in 1832. |
| Bengali possesses a degree of dialectual disparity in a variety of forms. One form of disparity rose over the adherence towards grammarian principles and Sanskritisation. The two divisions formed in this regard are the Shādhubhāshā (literally meaning "the language of sages" and also called Shuddhobhāshā) and Choltibhāshā (literally "the current or running language" and also called Cholitobhāshā or Cholitbhāshā in common speech). Songs like Jana Gana Mana" (written by Rabindranath Tagore) and "Vande Mataram" (by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay) are actually composed in the highly refined Sādhubhāshā form of Bengali. However, Shādhubhāshā is largely confined to literary and formal contexts. |
| Choltibhāshā comprises the standard pronunciation of Bengali and thus serves as the basis for the orthography of most Bengali literature today. It is modeled on the cultivated form of the dialect spoken in Kolkātā by educated people who had originated from districts bordering on the lower reaches of the Hooghly River. Choltibhāshā, though overwhelmingly Sanskrit-based, draws a large amount of its vocabulary from English, Arabic and Persian sources. From a strictly linguistic view, Choltibhāshā exhibits several marked departures from the traditional Shādhubhāshā Bengali, most noticeably in the usage of clipped verbal forms, consonantal simplification and the raising of the vowels. |
| Another form of divergence exists in the speech of Bengalis living on either side of the Hooghly River. Widely known as "The Purbo-Poschim Divide", the difference lies primarily in the pronunciation of the palato-alveolar affricates. In course of the standardization drive carried out during the British occupation of Bengal, the western ("Poschim") form of speech was established as the standard, thus deepening the divide. However, contemporary speech patterns across West Bengal and Bangladesh (the areas where the Purbo and Poschim dialects were especially prevalent) show no marked difference. |
| A third form of divergence issues from the influences other languages have had on Bengali. Bengal's early dominance by Buddhist Pala and Malla dynasties till the 12th century AD and subsequent Turkish and Moghul invasions and occupation created divergent cultural traditions among the people of Bengal. Subsequently, while certain sections of the Bengali population utilize a Sanskit-derived form of Bengali, other Bengali-speaking people employ a lexicon derived from Perso-Arabic sources. |
| The best-known examples of Indian literati hail from the land of Bengal. Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel Prize-winning "Gitanjali", Kazi Nazrul Islam's fiery poetic prowess, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's complex texturing of the many-layered fabric of rural life and Michael Madhusudhan Dutt's sonnets based on the "Mahabharatha" were written in this language of the Ganga. Bengal still carries the brand of literary prowess and still produces among India's finest writers. |
| In the stream of Indian consciousness, Bengali will always be the language whispering strains of "Vande Matatram" and The Indian National Anthem, a language which metaphorically ,has its origins from the heart of the holiest of rivers. |