Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

“ Bengali literature must for a long time to come be nothing more than merely the popular literature of Bengal. As long as the higher education continues to have English for its medium, as long as English literature and English science continue to maintain their present immeasurable superiority, these will form the sources of intellectual cultivation to the more educated classes. ”

“ We preach in English and harangue in English and write in English, perfectly forgetful that the great masses, whom it is absolutely necessary to move in order to carry out any great project of social reform, remain stone-deaf to all our eloquence. ”

“ The fact is that the Bengali will read only such books as contain anything worth reading; and books manufactured on a principle which ignores him as an intellectual being he will not read, and he does not read. Our most popular authors have succeeded by following precisely an opposite course. It is by following the principle of so-called simple publications, that so respectable a body as the Vernacular Literature Society have failed to make any contributions to the popular Bengali literature worth the name. ”

“ And it would be difficult to conceive a poem more typical than the Gitagovinda of the Bengali character as it had become after the iron heel of the Musalman tyrant had set its mark on the shoulders of the nation. From the beginning to the end it does not contain a single expression of manly feeling—of womanly feeling there is a great deal—or a single elevated sentiment. The poet has not a single new truth to teach. Generally speaking, it is the poets (religious or profane) who teach us the great moral truths which render man's life a blessing to his kind ”

“ It may be that there are few systematic readers of Bengali, because there are so few Bengali books capable of being read through. But it is not altogether correct to entertain the idea that the absolute number of purely Bengali readers are in reality so few. The artizan and the shopkeeper who keep their own accounts, the village zemindar and the mofussil lawyer, the humbler official employé whose English carries him no further than the duties of his office, and the small proprietor who has as little to do with English as with office, all these classes read Bengali and Bengali only ”

“ The first is the disinclination of the more educated classes to write for their country in their own language. Authorship is with us still the vocation of the needy and fawning Pundit, or the ambitious school-boy, or the idle scribbler who must needs be an author simply because he cannot be anything else. ”

“ Excepting a few books of recognized excellence, they are, when they are nothing more mischievous, either clumsy imitations of good Bengali models, or abject copies of the silly stories of the later Sanskrit writers, or a string of harmless commonplaces. ”

“ It is a movement which requires to be carefully studied and wisely stimulated, for it may exert a healthy or a pernicious influence on the national character, according to the direction it takes. The popular literature of a nation and the national character act and react on each other. ”

“ I know that a few such institutions have been already called into existence by public-spirited residents in the mofussil. It is desirable that they should become more general. A beginning may be made in every village where there is a Vernacular or Anglo-Vernacular School. One of the teachers of the school under the supervision of the School-Committee may keep cnarge of the books, and in the school-house room may be found for the book-shelves. Thus village libraries may be formed at once without more cost than the price of the books and the shelves. ”