Bengalis

“ The Bengalis are not inferior to any other race in India in brain-power, and Bengal has enjoyed the immense advantage of British peace, British administration, and European learning for a much longer period than any other province of India. ”

“ They have been the recipients of the highest honors from the Government. Bengal is virtually the only province permanently settled where the Government cannot add to the Land tax fixed in 1793. The Bengalis are the people who spread over India, with every territorial extension of the British Raj. They have been the pampered and favored children of the Government and for very good reasons, too. They are the best educated and the most intelligent of all the Indian peoples. They know how to adapt themselves to all conditions and circumstances, they know how to enjoy and also how to suffer. ”

“ The Bengalis are slow to reward the Christian missionaries who have worked among them for a century, but they are converted to Mohammedanism in droves, Whole villages adopting that casteless creed.
The laboring Hindu seems generally incompetent, and sadly lacks inventiveness, originality, ingenuity, and the all-embracing but indescribable faculty known as "gumption." His appliances, tools, and instruments are unchanged since the day of Alexander, and the mechanical sense seems wholly denied him. Everything has come to him with his conquerors. ”

“ What is said of the Bengalis may not be true of the inhabitants of Madras or Bombay, and the converse.
All the languages of India have been affected by intercourse with conquering nations, who, pouring down from the north-west, have in successive ages made themselves masters of great portions of the land. In all of them Sanscrit, the sacred and classic language of the Hindus, forms a large element, but in a constantly diminishing proportion as you journey from the north to the south. ”

“ The flowing white dress of the Bengali male people is now coming into fashion in other provinces also, but the Bengalis and Oriyas are only found to use no head-dress at all. I mention these facts with the object of showing, how deep and abiding, how intense and extensive, has been the influence of Magadha culture in Bengal. We may, I daresay, be fully justified to assert, what has been asserted before, that we in Bengal represent to-day the old Behar, more than the modern Beharis do in Behar. ”

“ In our honorific তিনি, there is the pronoun 'ন' in an enclitic manner; in Pāli, we get this 'ন' in the accusative case only in the form of নং (= তাহাকে) ; 'that respected he' is the round about expression to indicate honour: তেনার and তেন্‌রা (his) are not unusual in the mouth of our vulgar people. The Bengalis who settled in Orissa, long ago, carried with them, as a matter of course many archaic forms, and their descendants now, not being in touch with the progress and change effected in Bengal, use তেনার (his) , তান্‌রান (they) , etc., very commonly. ”

“ In Bengal especially, where they are most numerous, they are Bengalis pure and simple, many, perhaps most, of whom have adopted that faith quite recently from motives it is not difficult to understand or explain. Though there may consequently be 50,000,000 of Mussulmans in India at the present day, we may feel quite certain that not one-half of this number are immigrants or the descendants of emigrants who entered India during the last eight centuries. ”

“ The character of the people has undergone a decided change since leaving Delhi and Agra, and the Bengalis impress one decidedly unfavorably in comparison with the more manly and warlike races of the Punjab. Abject servility marks the demeanor of many, and utter uselessness for any purpose whatsoever, characterizes one's intuitive opinion of a large percentage of the population of the villages. ”

“ It does not attempt to enforce discipline in a city which flaunts every vice known to great seaports and commercial centres, unmitigated by the social instinct. Nor is the training of covenanted civilians more satisfactory. In 1909 only 1 out of 50 selected candidates presented himself for examination in Sanskrit or Arabic! Men go out to India at twenty-four, knowing little of the ethnology, languages or history of the races they are about to govern.
Agriculture.—Seventy-two per cent. of Bengalis live by cultivating the soil. ”

“ The Lower Assam language is Bengali. Were the Bengali the aborigines of Lower Assam? I believe that no one holds this doctrine. Is the present language that of Bengalis, who have displaced an aboriginal monosyllabic population? Perhaps. Or has an original monosyllabic population adopted the Bengali? No person is better capable of forming an opinion on this point than Mr. Hodgson; and his opinion is for the last of these views.
2. The converted Kooch.—Residents, in contact with [Pg 55] the Bodo and Dhimál, of the Sub-Himalayan range, between the north-west corner of Assam and Sikkim. ”

“ The cowardly agitator allots that task to the native soldiers when we shall have succeeded in seducing them from their allegiance. But the sepoys, recruited from races that hold only the warrior in honour, look on him and his race as something more despicable than dogs. My Rajputs—descendants of the gallant fighters who conquered half India, who struggled through bloody centuries against the Mohammedan invaders, whose women killed themselves when their lords had been slain and preferred death to dishonour—my sepoys regarded the effeminate Bengalis as unsexed beings. ”

“ I have left myself no space to finish this Pallab, or to make remarks on the peculiarities of the language, which in the older masters would more properly be called old Maithila than Bengali. It is nearly identical with the language still spoken in Tirhut, the ancient Mithili, and in Munger and Bhâgalpur, the ancient Magadha, than modern Bengali. As the Aryan race grew and multiplied it naturally poured out its surplus population in Bengal, and it is not only philologically obvious that Bengali is nothing more than a further, and very modern development of the extreme eastern dialect of Hindi. ”

“ No special theory is required to account for the physical and mental qualities of the Mongolo-Dravidians of Bengal. No doubt the original population was Dravidian with a strong intermixture of Tibeto-Burmese blood, especially in the east and north-east. But the Hindu religion, developed in the sacred Midlands round Benares, spread to Bengal, bringing with it the Indo-European speech which in medieval times became the copious and supple Bengali tongue. From the west too came what we in Europe would call the gentry, the priestly and professional castes. ”

“ It is not only to the voyager fresh from home that the ascent of the Ganges is novel and interesting. These things are as new to the resident of Madras as are the scenes of Italy to the Englishman. The people of Bengal differ from those of Southern India in language, dress, and looks, as well as in other respects. In frame, they are more slightly built, and less manly; indeed, they have the reputation of being the most effeminate of the Hindu races. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had gained admission to the caste of Whigs, whose battle-cry was "Knowledge for the People," and his brilliant rhetoric overpowered the arguments of champions of oriental learning. Every one with a smattering of Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian, regrets the fact that those glorious languages have not been adequately cultivated in modern India. Bengali is a true daughter of the Sanskrit; it has Italian sweetness and German capacity for expressing abstract ideas. No degree of proficiency in an alien tongue can compensate for the neglect of the vernacular. ”

“ It is no doubt a speciality in Bengal that though the real portion of the name of a man does not require any additional word, such words, as চন্দ্র, নাথ, etc., are added to the names, but it is not on account of this alone, that the Bengali names indicate the nationality of the men bearing the names to the people of other provinces. ”

“ I do not mean that each one of us should cling to the soil of his native village and that there is no need to stir outside it to gain knowledge or recognition. The Bengali cannot but be grateful to the forces of attraction which have drawn him out, roused his faculties, and broadened his mind by widening his sphere of activity. But the time has come to remind the sons of Bengal that they must not turn topsy-turvy the natural relations of within and without. Men go abroad to earn, and come home to spend. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the Bengali noun we have a purely inflectional genitive, the legitimate descendant of the Sanskrit termination -asya. Bengali and Oṛiya are like overgrown children, always returning to suck the mother’s breast, when they ought to be supporting themselves on other food. Consequently the written Bengali, afraid to enter boldly on the path of development, hugs the ancient Sanskrit forms as closely as it can, and misleads the reader by exhibiting as genuine Bengali what is merely a resuscitation of classical Sanskrit. ”

“ But the first Bengali with a scientific insight to attack the problems of the language was the poet Rabindranath Tagore; and it is flattering for the votaries of Philology to find in one who is the greatest writer in the language, and a great poet and seer for all time, a keen philologist as well, distinguished alike by an assiduous enquiry into the facts of the language and by a scholarly appreciation of the methods and findings of the modern western philologist. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In an introductory essay on Bengali novels, in his translation of Babu Bunkim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel ‘Kopal Kundala,’ Mr. Phillips writes:— The position and character of Bengali literature is peculiar. A backward people have, so to speak, rushed into civilization at one bound: old customs and prejudices have been displaced, uno ictu, by a state of enlightenment and advanced ideas. The educated classes have suddenly found themselves face to face with the richest gems of Western learning and literature. ”

“ It is a striking phenomenon that there are some linguistic peculiarities, wherein Oriya agrees with Assamese, and differs from Bengali. This phenomenon can only be explained by this, that Bengal as a progressive country has altered the early forms, while the archaic forms have been retained in Orissa and Assam. We can safely hold, that the Māgadhi language, as was once fashioned and modified on the soil of Bengal, got into Assam to take a fresh root there to develop into a new language under the influence of a language altogether foreign to the Aryan speech. ”

“ Some Bengali writers, who do not know what the real sound of য় is, make at times the unscientific and useless attempt to represent the sound by য + আ to convey the peculiar Bengali sound to the ears of the foreigners. They do not know that the spelling গ্যাল for গেল is highly misleading to the people all over India, for ই অ is the sound of both য, and য ফলা—outside the presidency of Bengal. The Indians of all other provinces, as well as the Europeans, who come to learn Bengali after studying Sanskrit or Hindi, are sure to pronounce গ্যাল as গিয়াল. ”

“ He seldom wears head-covering, his hair is smoothly dressed, he is erect, and walks with a pompous stride. One can always tell a Bengali, as he appears neater in appearance than Indians from other sections. His looks betoken his thoughts, for he entertains the opinion that he is the essence of human kind in India, or even of the world. ”