Bengali literature

“ The case of criticism is worse. We can hardly hope for a healthy and vigorous Bengali literature in the utter absence of anything like intelligent criticism. The educated Bengali fails in this department almost as much as the antiquated pundit, in consequence no doubt of deficient culture.
Those who are familiar with the present writers in Bengali, will readily admit that they all, good and bad alike, may be classed under two heads, the Sanskrit and the English schools. The former represents Sanskrit scholarship and the ancient literature of the country ”

“ Bengali literature has made such wonderful progress because it cut through all the artificial barriers which would have shut it off from communion with world literature, and because it has regulated its growth in such a way as to be able to make its own, naturally and with ease, the science and ideals of the West... ”

“ However much we may lament the poverty of Bengali literature, the last fifteen years have been a period of great progress and hope; within that time at least a dozen writers have arisen, every one of whom is immensely superior, in whatever is valuable in a writer, to this—the most popular of their predecessors. ”

“ Bengali literature is not old enough to have elaborated those internal checks which can serve to control its votaries. As experience in writing is gained the Bengali writer has to evolve the restraining force from within himself. This makes it impossible for him to avoid the creation of a great deal of rubbish during a considerable length of time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She brought to her work a certain fervid originality that, before the end of the 19th century, redeemed Bengali literature in English from the commonplace. She is the first of the new school of Indian poets, and both in England and India her place and her memory are assured.
Of living authors whose work has been illustrated in this volume, it is unnecessary to speak at length. Poets in our midst.There is much in the life of modern India to foster intellectual and artistic activity. A perfervid political enthusiasm; the intense realisation of racial and national sentiment ”

“ No contemporary Englishman had a wider knowledge or a more just and discriminating appreciation of Bengali literature, and none was more delighted to watch and promote the advance of the Bengali. To great knowledge of oriental subjects he added a charming personality, and he was ever ready to assist students in the subjects of which he made a speciality. ”

“ Here, in 1849, he produced The Captive Ladie; and thereafter devoted himself to the study and cultivation of Bengali literature. In 1861 his classical narrative poem, Meghanadbadh, and his translation of the notorious Nil Darpan, brought him prominently into notice. In the following year he went to England and studied law; but his subsequent career was not fortunate; and in 1873 he died in poverty. His name is beloved by his countrymen; and Ram Sharma's memorial lines, quoted in this volume, have found a ready response in Bengal. ”

“ There is probably no writer whose merits are more variously estimated—some enthusiasts thinking him fit to compare with Kalidasa, while others regard him as a mere poetaster. For ourselves we agree with neither, and while admitting his considerable merits, we are not prepared to rank him among great poets. He has incurred much hostile criticism by his innovations in language, and by his introduction into Bengali of the use of blank verse, but his rightful place in Bengali literature is perhaps the highest. ”

“ The palace of comparative grammar cannot be built without bricks, and the bricks are made up of the facts of each particular language.
For many reasons, Bengali, in itself, is specially deserving of careful study. With a literature going back for several centuries, and preserved with some care, it gives opportunities for the study of its history that are wanting in some other forms of Indian speech. It ts a typical descendant of the great language that, under the name of Māgadhī Prakrit, was the vernacular of eastern North India for many centuries. ”

“ We frequently come across such lines in old Bengali works, as—"Naturally Bengali poems are faulty" [11] (Vijay gupta) "Not fit to he discussed in a vernacular poem" [12] (Kavīndra) —implying, that Bengali was quite an unfit medium for conveying any serious or high thought.
How could Bengali obtain favour in the Hindu Courts?The question is: how could the poor Vernacular of Bengal find recognition in the courts of the kings, inspite of this opposition of the Brahmins? Every Hindu Court gloried in keeping a number of Sanskrit scholars attached to it. ”

“ In fact it is probable, that Bengal was mostly peopled by the descendants of the early citizens of Magadah, [9] hence Brahmanism could not thrive for many centuries amidst a people, who were the pioneers of Buddhism.
Bengali, a form of Paiçachi Prakrita.The Buddhist priests had already, in the latter part of the tenth century, begun to write books in Prākrita called the Gouḍa Prākrita. This Prākrita was called by the grammarian Kriṣṅa Pandit, who flourished in the twelfth century, as a form of Paiçāchī Prākrita or a Prākrita spoken by the evil spirits. ”

“ In languages such as Panjabi which have little or no literature, and in the speech of the peasantry all over India, they are few in number. In the modern literary Bengali a false standard of literary taste has led to their employment in overwhelming numbers, and the homely vigorous home-speech, which is itself capable of expressing every idea that the mind of man can conceive, flounders about awkwardly enough under the weight of its borrowed plumes. The native vocabulary of the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars is thus made up of tadbhavas, dēśyas and tatsamas. ”

“ Quite often he picked up unknown writers and helped them to give their best to his own great mission of making Bengali a medium for great thoughts and ideals. The purpose of literature,' he once wrote, 'is to help toward ultimate perfection in the culture of beauty, and to instill purity into the mind of man by creative thoughts.'
In the realisation of this ideal, as well as in the general development of literature in Bengal, Chatterji's Bengali magazine, Bangadarshan, played an important role. This magazine, by the way, was later edited by Rabindranath Tagore. ”

“ The clash of widely divergent stages of civilization, the juxtaposition of the most advanced thought with comparative barbarism has produced results which, though perhaps to be expected, are somewhat curious. If one tries to close a box packed with more than it can hold, the lid may be unhinged,—new wine may burst old bottles. The colliding forces of divergent stages of civilization have produced a literature that, for want of a better expression, may be called a hybrid compromise between eastern and western ideas. So we find that the Bengali novel is to a great extent an exotic. ”

“ Instances of like nature, where Mahammadan Emperors and Chiefs initiated and patronised translations of Sanskrit and Persian works into Bengali, are numerous, and we are led to believe, that when the powerful Moslem Sovereigns of Bengal granted this recognition to the Vernacular language in their courts, Hindu Rājās naturally followed suit. The Brahmins could not resist the influence of this high patronage; they were therefore compelled to favour the language they had hated so much, and latterly they themselves came forward to write poems and compile works of translation in Bengali. ”

“ But while books and newspapers are daily pouring from the press, the quality of our current literature is by no means proportioned to its bulk. In fact, by far the greatest part (of) what is published is absolute rubbish. There are several modern Bengali books of which we shall have to speak in terms of high praise, but the number of these is so small in comparison with the mass of publications yearly vomited forth by the Bengali press, that they go but a little way towards redeeming the character of the whole. ”

“ No doubt, speaking generally, the vernacular languages of India are not worth studying for the sake of their literature; but if in this respect one vernacular is worthy of study more than another, it is certainly the Bengali language.
Many people in England regard the natives of India much in the same light as they regard the natives of Africa. A perusal of the following tale will at least give them some conception of the stage of civilization at which the Bengali race has arrived, and of the intellectual attainments of the educated classes. ”

“ And very few are the Bengali minds that have yet reached a point in the assimilation and expression of a new form of thought and knowledge, which would make it possible to say that they are of another age than that of Vikramaditya. Of that new age Science is to be the pivot and centre, and there can be no doubt that the era of Science, with its collateral development of geography and history, will directly succeed that of the Guptas, with its Sanskrit Literature and logic in Bengal. ”

“ Intelligent criticism may be said to be a thing unknown to the Native Press. There is some inherent defect in the Bengali character which renders the task of distinguishing the beautiful and the true from the gaudy and the false a task of even greater difficulty than the higher effort of creation. This deficiency in the culture of the cultivated Bengali reacts on the literature. The blundering critic often passes a verdict, which, if he happen to be an authority accustomed to command respect on literary matters, misleads by its error and strikes at the root of all excellence. ”

“ From the time of Vikramāditya it grew to be a fashion with Hindu kings to keep learned companions, and they were generally picked men—finished masters in Sanskrit Poetry, Grammar and Logic, who revelled in the high flown style and in the niceties of rhetoric which abound in the latter-day Sanskrit works, such as Kādamvarī, Daçakumār Charita and Çri Harṣa Charita. The copperplate-inscriptions of the Pāl and Sen Kings of Bengal bear abundant proofs of the learning and poetical powers of some of these gifted men, whose contempt for Bengali was as great as was their scholarship in Sanskrit. ”

“ Another great impediment to the formation of a respectable and readable popular literature for Bengal is the extremely low idea some people entertain of the capacities of the Bengali-reading public. It is assumed that books intended for them must contain childish stories and information suited to children only and treated in a childish style, or they will not suit the understanding of the adult reading population of Bengal. No kind of literary excellence—no sentiments of a manly and elevating character must be permitted to creep into such books ”

“ 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 ”

“ Progress of the Vernacular retarded.With the decadence of the power of the Buddhist priests, who in their zeal to popularize their creed, had not considered the Vernacular of Bengal as an unworthy medium for propagating their religious views, Bengali lost the patronage which it had secured of the lettered men of the country ”

“ The Pāthān Emperors and Chiefs could not have the great patience of the Hindu Kings who were inspired by a religious zeal to hear the Brahmin scholars recite Sanskrit texts and their learned annotations, step by step, requiring the listeners many long years to complete a course of lectures on the Rāmāyaṅa or the Mahābhārata. They appointed scholars to translate the works into Bengali which they now spoke and understood. ”

“ The learned author remarks, that as long as the whole of the Jaina scriptures have not been critically edited, many dark pages of the history of the ancient and modern Indian languages and literature will not be illumined. Dr. Barnett says that "neither the political nor the literary nor the religious history of India, can ever be written until an exact study has been made" of the Jaina scriptures composed in this Māgadhi Prākṛta. What has been opined with reference to the history of India in general, is specially and particularly true regarding the history of Bengal in all its aspects. ”