Musalmani Bangla and its transformation

[kalu_miah]

Here in this thread we would like to explore the past of Bangla language, mainly from the period of Muslim rule since 13th century till the present. We will explore how the language has evolved through different periods since then. Also we will look at what possibilities of transformation for the language there are for the future, in Bangladesh.

Puthi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Puthi is a book of poetic fairy tales and religious stories of rural ancient Bengal which were read by a senior ‘educated’ person while others would listen. This was used as a medium for education and constructive entertainment.

Puthis are ancient manuscripts. In Bengal, these books were different and unlike any other book at that time. Writers, or Munshis, used to write in Songskrito, Bengali, or local varieties of Bengali.

The pages of Puthis could be leaves, sheets of wood, or old papers. Uaually, they were written on one side and bound with a piece of string.

Abdul Karim Sahitya Bisharad collected more than 2,000 Puthis. More than 1,000 of them were written by Bengali Muslims. No other person or organization has collected this number of Puthis before.

Banglapedia

Karim, Sahityavisharad Abdul (1871-1953) Sahityavisharad,a litterateur, historian of Bangla literature and collector and interpreter of old Bangla manuscripts. Born in village Suchakradandi in Patiya Upazila within greater Chittagong, Abdul Karim Sahityavisharad passed his Entrance Examination in 1893 from Patiya High School. He served as a teacher in some schools, later joined the office of the Divisional Commissioner of Chittagong, and finally became Divisional Inspector of Schools. He retired in 1934. Abdul Karim started writing literary articles in early life. His literary pursuits drew the attention of contemporary literati.

His special interest was Muslim contribution to Bangla literature in the medieval period. Throughout his life he collected old Bangla manuscripts (calledputhis). The Vangiya Sahitya Parisadpublished his catalogue of Bangla manuscripts entitled Bangala Prachin Puthir Bivaran in two volumes in 1920-21. The major portion of his manuscript collection, comprising works by Muslim poets, is preserved in the Dhaka University Library and the rest, written by Hindu poets, in the VARENDRA RESARES MUSUAM, Rajshahi. The Bengali department of Dhaka University has published a catalogue of the manuscripts preserved in the University Library under the title Puthi Parichiti.

Abdul Karim Sahityavisharad

Abdul Karim himself edited and published eleven old Bangla texts; he also wrote a book on the history and culture of Chittagong, entitled Islamabad and co-authored with Dr Muhammad Enamul Haq a book entitled Arakan Rajsabhaya Bangla Sahitya. All these are scholarly works. His collection of manuscripts produced by Muslim poets indicates that the Muslim intellectuals of the medieval age had made great contributions to the development of Bangla literature. Some poets like daulat qazi, alaol, syed sultan, Muhamad Khan etc are rated among the greatest Bengali poets. Abdul Karim discovered about a hundred Muslim poets whose names and works were not known before.

Nadia Sahitya Sabha (Literary Association of Nadia) honored him with the title of Sahitya Sagar, while Chattal Dharmamandali gave him the title of Sahitya Visharad. He always preferred the latter and used it with his name and is remembered by this singular title. [Abdul Karim]

Banglapedia
ll Bangla Language ll

Puthi Literature:a special genre of literature written in a mixed vocabulary drawn from Bangla, Arabic, Urdu, Persian and Hindi. It was current during the 18th and the 19th centuries and its composers as well as readers were Muslims. The word puthi (or punthi) is derived from pustika or book. However, only a particular type of writing dating from the 18th-19th centuries is known as puthi.

This genre was initiated by Fakir Garibullah (c 1680-1770) with amir hamza,an epic on warfare combining both Arabian history and legends. Its language differs from the traditional Bangla of the period with a third of its vocabulary consisting of foreign words. The poet presumably based his language on the spoken dialect of the ordinary Muslims of Hughli, Howrah, Kolkata, and 24-Parganas. Garibullah and his disciple syed hamza wrote several other poems. Many other Muslim poets emulated them in composing similar poems. These were read by the Muslims of all strata of society but were most popular among the low-paid employees, traders and workers.

Because of its vocabulary and syntax, puthi literature has been variously named. james long has described its language as 'Muslim Bengali' and the literature as 'Muslim Bengali literature'. It is also known as bat-talar puthi as the books were printed at the presses of Kolkata's bat-tala and also sold there. Researchers first categorized the puthis as dobhasi because of the hybrid qualities of their language and the construction of their sentences but later termed them as 'verses in mixed language'.

The puthi composer was generally known as a shaer, Arabic for 'poet'. In the prefatory verses of Amir Hamza, Syed Hamza describes the work as shaeri puthi or poetic puthi. Although read from left to right like other Bangla books, puthi text was printed from right to left as in Arabic and Persian. It is composed in the payar and tripadi metres, in very simple language shorn of ornamentation.

Many Muslim poets of the period wrote in both sadhu or chaste Bangla as well as in dobhasi Bangla. Thus Garibullah's first book in verse, yusuf-zulekha, was written in chaste Bangla. He wroteSonabhan, Satyapirer Puthi, janganama and Amir Hamza in the mixed language. Garibullah left Amir Hamza unfinished and the poem was later completed by Syed Hamza in 1795. Like Garibullah, Hamza's first work, Madhumalati, was written in chaste Bangla. His two later works - jaiguner puthi (1798) and Hatem Tai (1804) - were written in dobhasi.

It should be noted, however, that dobhasi was not completely novel. A similar mixture of Bangla and Arabic-Persian words were used in some narrative verses composed at least two centuries earlier. For example, Arabic-Persian words and Hindi-Urdu syntax are used in dealing with Muslim issues in Manasavijay (1495) by bipradas pipilai, inChandimangal (1598) by mukundaram chakravarti, in Raimangal (1686) by Krishnaram Das and Annadamangal (1752) by Bharatchandra. As their names reveal, these poets were all Hindu. After the Turkish conquest of Bengal in the 13th century, Persian became the official language and both Hindu and Muslim communities started learning the language for personal advancement. In addition to Persian, Muslims also learnt Arabic. This led to the influx of a large stock of Arabic-Persian words into Bangla. Following the establishment of administrative, commercial and cultural links of Bengal with the Mughal capital, Delhi, during the 16th century, a large number of Muslims started visiting Bengal. Urdu-speaking Muslims engaged in state, religious and educational activities, and their families started settling in Murshidabad, Hughli, Howrah etc. Urdu-Hindi words now began to have a significant influence on Bangla.

Persian was so important at the time that, apart from Muslims and Hindus, the employees of the European trading companies too started learning it. Before coming to India the employees of the East India Company used to learn Persian at seminaries in Britain. After observing the state of bangla language in the 18th century, nathaniel brassey halhed in A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778) said that those who spoke Bangla using the largest number of Arabic and Persian adjectives with Bangla verbs were regarded as knowing Bangla well. The documents and legal papers of the 18th century largely used this kind of language. Sukumar Sen termed it as a 'working language' or the 'language of usage'. Bharatchandra called ityabani mishal (Muslim mixture). He himself learned this language and claimed that although it did not possess high literary qualities it was understood by all. Bharatchandra and Garibullah came from the same region of Bhurshut Pargana at about the same time. The spoken language of the common people, irrespective of whether they were Hindu or Muslim, was the language of puthi literature and thus cannot be termed as an artificial literary language. The ordinary educated Muslim liked it because of the mixture of Arabic and Persian vocabulary.

With some exceptions, most puthi literature was derivative with poets using Persian, Urdu and Hindi works as their sources. While borrowing from these works, they not only adopted the subjects but also many words, parts of sentences and even their syntax. In terms of subjects and themes, puthi literature can be divided into six categories: (1) romantic love stories, (2) poems on warfare, (3) biographies of prophets and other holy men, (4) folktales about pirs, (5) poems about Islamic history and religious rites, and (6) contemporary events. To the first category belongs Yusuf-Zulekha,laily-majnu, Shiri-Farhad, Saifulmuluk Badiuzzamal, gule bakawali andBenazir-Badre Munir.These are love stories of men and women based on legends and folktales of Arabia, Iran and India. Amir Hamza, Sonabhan, Jaiguner Puthi and Hatem Tai belong to the second category. These poems give colourful descriptions of the wars fought and the kingdoms conquered by heroes of the pre-Islamic days and describe how Islam was propagated. The third category of poems speaks of the life, character and religious work of well-known prophets, pirs and holy men of Islam.

To this category belong Kasasul Ambia, Tajkiratul Awlia, and Hazar Masla. The fourth category contains stories about conflicts, wars and finally the friendship of imaginary Muslim pirs and fakirs with Hindu gods and goddesses. Among these are satyapirer panchali, gazi kalu-champavati, banabibir zahurnama and Lalmoner Kechchha.The fifth category contains poems like Nasihatnama and Fazilate Darood which elucidateIslamic rites and religious rituals. The sixth category of poems, though fewer in number, were written about Islamic personalities such as haji shariatullah and historic events like the Wahabi-Faraezi movement. Jalalatul Fokre has a description of the hostility of the orhtodox Muslims towards the baul community. But puthis that describe such contemporary events are rare. Most contain imaginary stories based on a mixture of ancient history, anecdotes and traditions. Poems depicting the lives of such heroes as Hanifa, Hamza, Hatem Tai, Sohrab-Rustam and Joigun Bibi were very popular, as were poems based on supernatural actions performed by historical or imaginary pir-awlias and other holy men.

The reason was that the subjugated Muslims found solace in the glorious past of Islam, especially the heroism of Muslim conquerors, the spread of Islam and the destruction of non-believers. The puthi poets created for the Muslims a world of fantasy and heroism away from the world of realities and the revolutionary changes brought about in Bangla language and literature in the 19th century by raja rammohun roy, iswar chandra vidyasagar, michael madhusudan dutt, bankimchandra chattopadhyayetc.The Hindu writers discarded dobhasi Bangla as soon as the pundits of fort william college introduced chaste Bangla and modern prose. Even the Muslims receiving modern education discarded dobhasi Bangla. The change was hastened by the language policies of the British towards English, Persian and Bangla. It is likely that had there been no change in the political scenario, dobhasi Bangla, the Bangla of puthi literature, would have become the language of the common people. The language and literature nurtured by a section of Muslims up to the 19th century in defiance of the changes of the age are no longer popular today, but they continue to hold some value for the literary and social historian.

There have been a number of surveys of how many poets belonged to this tradition and the number of poems written by them. In his A Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Works (1885), James Long gave a list of 41 dobhasi puthis. muhammad mansuruddin listed 270 such puthis in his Bangla Sahitye Muslim Sadhana (1964) without giving the names of their authors. A list of about 200 puthis by over a hundred poets appears in Puthi-Parichiti (1958) edited by ahmed sharif. Ali Ahmed's book Mudrita Kalami Puthi contains a list of 569 puthis with their authors. [Wakil Ahmed]

Bibliography Sukumar Sen, Islami Bangla Sahitya, 2nd ed, Kolkata, 1973; Muhammad Mansuruddin, Bangla Sahitye Muslim Sadhana, Dhaka, KA Mannan, Emergence and Development of Dobhasi Literature in Bengal, Dhaka, 1966, Anisuzzaman, Muslim-Manas O Bangla Sahitya, Dhaka, 1964.

Linguistic History: Bengali along with two other cognate languages, Assamese and Oriya, as well as Magadhi, Maithili and Bhojpuri in south-east zone forms a linguistic group. Their immediate source can be traced back to the Magadhi Prakrit or Eastern Prakrit which was brought to this area from Magadh (or Bihar) and the language of Gauda-Banga with other eastern languages developed from this through Magadh Apabhramsa, Genetically Bengali is derived from Indo-Aryan (IA) or the Indic sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages.

The literary documents of IA language in Indian Peninsula can be classified into three periods according to their linguistic changes. (i) Old Indo-Aryan (OIA) (1500 BC/1200 BC - 600 BC) (ii) Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) (600 BC -1000 AD) (iii) New Indo-Aryan (NIA) (1000 AD - Present Time)

All these three have some substages. Bengali belongs to the NIA which was broadly derived from MIA. But there are also some written documents like Donha of Tantric Buddhists, Nathists, Saivaties or Jainas which can be traced as a transitional phase form MIA to NIA which is mentioned as Avahattha (avahattha) or Proto New Indo Aryan.

The inadequacy of written documents of immediate Pre-Bengali period is one of the most important limi-tations to find out the gradual change from Apabhramsa, Avahattha to the historic period of Bengali (16th century AD). There is no document of Magadhi Apabhramsa except a small inscription. The Avahattha literature are also not sufficient. The earliest literary record in Bengali is the Caryacaryaviniscaya. Till the 16th century, all the documents are copies of the original with varying degrees of correctness. After the 16th Century AD, the documents have more or less survived till today. On the basis of these documents, Bengali has three distinct periods:

1. Old Bengali: AD 950/1000 - AD 1200/1350

2. Middle Bengali: AD 1350 - AD 1800

(i) Early Middle Bengali AD 1350 - AD 1450/1600

(ii) Late Middle Bengali AD 1600 - AD 1800

3. Modern Bengali: AD 1800 - today.

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/TESTold/James.1.html

Diglossia, religion, and ideology: On the mystification of cross-cutting aspects of Bengali language variation
James M. Wilce
Northern Arizona University

Introduction

This paper critiques several approaches to the Bengali language situation, approaches which touch on aspects of the language which I have not personally studied--particularly earlier forms of Bengali. It is a critique of sociolinguistics narrowly-defined, and more broadly of scholarly work which omits reflexive self-positioning. I hope experts in the Bengali language and its history will receive this paper as an attempt to shed light on problems and carry academic discussion into new ground.1

In particular, I juxtapose three discourses surrounding Bengali: historiography, sociolinguistics, and language-planning. Historians portray the Bengali language as a communal-political football and sociolinguists as one language riven by class and literacy. Language planners, viz. the East Bengal Language Committee, tried to shape the evolution of the Bengali language. Unfortunately, these planners were not alone in confusing facts with goals, history with hagiography, and the chimera of linguistic purity with the ravenous god of communal purity. It seems exceedingly difficult for any given scholar or bureaucrat who has weighed in on the Bengali linguistic situation to consider both religio-cultural and social-stratificational factors. Yet when the three traditions are examined together, insights arise which are missed by any one of them alone.

Historiography of the Bengali language: Narrating the rise of communal diversity in the competitive encounter of civilizations

The Bengali language, like most, reflects heterogeneous sources. In the interests of space I must begin my survey of this history with the fourteenth century, which was not, in fact, an era in which Bengali literature itself was very heterogeneous. Looking back on that era, the relatively uniform standard for Bengali literature--which transcended the boundaries between the medieval Muslim elite, which was foreign, and Hindu court authors--is more obvious than any heterogeneity of Bengali literary styles. Any author of Central/West Asian or indigenous ancestry who chose the Bengali medium--and the choice itself was controversial (Haq 1957: 115)--accepted the common literary standard.

Of course, this standard itself evolved, gradually including an increasing amount of Perso-Arabic influence at least at the lexical level. But it marked a new era of heterogeneity when dobha\s>i Bangla emerged. Ironically, according to Q.A. Mannan, it was fifteenth century Hindus at court who introduced a self-consciously mixed literary style, dobha\s>i Bangla.2 It was the coexistence of this dobha\s>i style with another, purportedly dominant and freer of Perso-Arabic admixture, which ended the era of uniformity. Again, by "uniformity" I mean only that before this point Muslims had joined with local poets in using a common standard and the possibility of a polyvocality or diversity based on differential degrees of borrowing from Perso-Arabic had not been realized. However, it is important to keep in mind that when dobha\s>i Bangla arose, it by no means served as an index of the author's own communal identity. Rather, writing in dobha\s>i might actually have served to mark a religiously Hindu identity embedded in a stance of loyalty to the Mughal state. Following Oberoi's new history of Sikhism (1994), we should be cautious about projecting backwards into the medieval era communal identity-boundaries (linguistic or otherwise indexed). If Hindus at court used a Persianized style at times, Muslims were also known to write Vais>nava poetry (Haq 1957: 51, Dimock 1967). In sum, no form of Bengali had communalist connotations, since communalism per se emerged later.

Complementary schismogenesis arising out of the colonial impact

The colonial impact was great and complex. The Orientalists at Ft. William College--Hastings, Jones, Gilchrist, and Hunter--at least paid lip service to the goal of reviving purer, older forms of India's religions. Analogously, their approach to the language probably combined some desire to Anglicize with stronger conflicting tendencies either to purify and standardize Bengali or to romanticize and glorify vernacular forms (Kopf 1969). At any rate, there arose at the College a class of pundits whose Bengali self-consciously eliminated borrowings from Islamicate languages.3 Sanskritization of Bengali proceeded apace. Not surprisingly, since this s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ differed from the common speech of Muslims in particular, there arose in reaction a Muslim form of speech--i.e. an form called "Musalmani Bangla" took increasingly distinct shape. So, Hindus under British influence took linguistically puristic steps, which provoked counter-steps by Muslims to "purify" Bengali of Sanskritic influence if that were possible. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson called this sort of mutual differentiation process "complementary schismogenesis," which is a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals [or groups]É [or the study of] the reactions of individuals to the reactions of other individuals" (1958: 175).4

The preceding discussion entails a composite historical picture summarizing studies by Kopf (1969), Mannan (1966), Haq (1957), and S.K. Chatterji (1934) at face value. What of their representations of history? From our vaunted position, of course, their interests or advocacy-stances are clear. Chatterji often railed against the 19th century "defiling" of Bengali in Musalmani literature; Haq simultaneously served as a Bengali apologist within Pakistan and an Islamist revisionist among historians of the language; and Kopf advocates the relative virtue, among colonialists, of the Ft. Williams Orientalists vis-ˆ-vis the later Macaulay.

For scholars to take such stances is natural, and only problematic to the degree that the reasons for such advocacy are opaque, arising out of covert ideological commitment. But there is another problem to the historiography as well-- its neglect of synchronic class-based or situational linguistic variation. Although the historian Benedict Anderson (1991) demonstrates the richness of a historiography attuned to synchronic linguistic diversity and the shaping role of "print capitalism" in the emergence of nationalism and other forms of identity, his work is exceptional and probably reflects the recent "linguistic turn" in history and the social sciences. Admittedly, historians of Bengal have not missed religious or ethnically-based variation in language. They have, on the other hand, missed the social facts which occupy sociolinguists, particularly class-based linguistic diversity. (Unfortunately, the inverse is largely true of those sociolinguists who have written on Bengali diglossia; their studies of the ways Bengali reflects differences of class and literacy have ignored religious factors. Moreover, Chatterjee's and Singh's papers are ahistorical.)

This paper can be read as an exploration of the ways in which an author's own class-status influence the shape of the research and writing. In this regard I repeat that such positionedness is only dangerous to the academic enterprise insofar as it is unacknowledged and exercises covert ideological influence. Here I offer only a foretaste of the illustrations provided below, the example of the historians of the Bengali language. Why would the Pakistani apologist Haq and the anti-Musalmani-Bangla scholar S. Kumar Chatterji contribute almost equally to the denigration of Musalmani Bangla literature.5 Might there, then, be more at stake here than communal identity?

Bengali diglossia: Class and literacy-based linguistic diversity

Another literature exists, complementary to the historical literature on Bengali. My sample consists only of three papers published in 1986 by Suhas Chatterjee, Dil, and Singh. All three describe the sociolinguistic phenomenon of "diglossia" in Bengali, taking a synchronic perspective on linguistic diversity. If the historians of language, in exploring competing religious tugs on the Bengali language, seem blind to situational and sociological variables shaping linguistic variation, these students of diglossia have omitted the diachronic perspective, ignoring evidence of conflict and communalism. These omissions are all the more noticeable when the sociolinguists' own data evince conflict along class and communal lines. A focus on historic struggles and competing ideologies must come together with the sociolinguists' discussion of synchronic variation. The sociolinguistic view adds specificity to the historical, and the historians place linguistic variation in larger contexts.

Definitions

"Diglossia"--a conceptual overview

Every speech community includes variation yet contains it within common norms of use of its linguistic resources-- codes, dialects, registers, and styles. Some speech communities are characterized by a particularly stable relationship between variant forms of a language, one in which one variety adheres fairly closely to a literary tradition and derives prestige from it while another recognized spoken variant is considered inferior but intimate. Charles Ferguson (1959) called this hierarchical relationship between two variants within a speech community "diglossia." It entails a structural and functional gap between a Hi and a Lo variant, in which no one speaks the Hi natively. Diglossia, in his words, is:

a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards) there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposed but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation (1959: 336)********************
Hi-----Lo
Used in official contexts-----Used in domestic contexts
Formal style-----Informal style
Must be taught in conjunction with literacy-----Acquired naturally by children in spoken form
No native speakers-----Many native speakers
********************

Characterizing Bengali variation

How might the diglossia concept illumine the Bengali situation? This "etic" or analytic concept does capture something more than does the common "emic" (insiders') distinction between s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ and calit bha\s>a\ . Actually, as Tagore and Dimock pointed out in their times, even the distinction between s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ and calit bha\s>a\ is becoming blurred. "Diglossia" captures more of the dynamic relationships between class, literacy, and spoken language characteristic of Bengali at least since the turn of the century. The concept is thus more useful than other visions of the Bengali situation.

Still, whereas Ferguson's classic examples of diglossia were neatly divided into two "vertically" distinct forms as the term suggests,6 the Bengali situation is more complex. One problem with representations of Bengali in the sociolinguistic literature concerns the pervasiveness of certain s;a\dhu ("pedantic") features among all rural speakers, including the illiterate. Specifically, rural Bengali speech almost universally preserves the verbal stem suffix /-i/. Among the 1986 papers, only Suhas Chatterjee's does justice to this fact by categorizing certain feature sets as Low s;a\dhu bha\s>a\, LSB. LSB, he says, preserves the long verb stem but lacks Sanskritic lexical elements, substituting simple verbal nouns and adjectives for derived abstract forms. Thus Suhas Chatterjee's model--by adding a second, horizontal (historical-grammatical) dimension of contrast to the vertical (prestige)--more adequately captures the relation of Hi and Lo forms to calit and s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ :

Suhas Chatterjee's Model of Bengali Diglossia:

"Hi" and "Lo" forms of Bengali with subvariants

Diglossic status Bengali designation A Bengali designation B
Hi High s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ High calit bha\s>a\
Lo Low s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ Low calit bha\s>a\

Explanation

High s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ ("pedantic language")-- HSB
Literary code, heavily Sanskrit in lexicon, employing processes of derivational morphology not used in other variants (Chatterjee 1986: 296), i.e. to create abstract and technical vocabulary suitable to Hindu philosophical discourse

Low calit bha\s>a\ ("current language")-- LCB
(Note: calit is commonly called calti )
"The Calcutta colloquial"; verbal forms shortened by deletion of the /-i/ suffix, lacking the lexicon produced by the derivational processes referred to above

Low s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ -- LSB
Identical to HSB in verbal forms (long), but lacking derived lexicon

High calit bha\s>a\ -- HCB
Combines shortened verbal forms with the derivational lexicon of HSB

Testable claims of diglossic variation in today's Bengali

From the viewpoints of the ethnography of communication or correlational sociolinguistics the 1986 studies have methodological problems. None of them used what those schools would recognize as an adequately empirical method, neither recording representative samples of speech in everyday contexts nor recording hundreds of participants whose speech attitudes and behaviors are elicited through the subtle methods of William Labov. Thus, I regard the 1986 claims as deserving of testing but by no means demonstrated. Specifically, the question of how Bengalis actually speak and write, and the extent to which those actual productions can be neatly characterized in either Ferguson's or Chatterjee's terms, remains unanswered. What follows, therefore, are claims which should be investigated. These claims roughly match my sense of the observable situation, and thus they are presented without quotation marks or other hedges, but my disclaimer should be kept in mind.

No one today speaks the Bengali of Carey's Bible or even of newspapers like the daily Ittefaq; if some can and do give such literate forms voice, the requisite skill is not learned at home but in school. Only in school do rural Bangladeshi students from illiterate families learn H varieties. In fact, even wealthy Dhaka students whose families speak a prestigious calit must learn s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ in school. Thus children acquire one form naturally and learn others in school. The gap between written and spoken Bengali far exceeds that in, say, American English. The gap between the "H" and "L" variants in a classically diglossic situation as described by Ferguson certainly obtains in Bengali. Chatterjee, citing Ferguson's nine parameters of a diglossic situation, finds that H and L codes in Bengali diverge in all parameters except phonology.7 At any rate, H and L Bengali show complementarity of function, a hierarchy of status ascribed even by those who do not command H, and literary heritage almost exclusively in H.8

Diglossic values enforced in school

The diglossia concept does not preclude the possibility of "code-switching" among diglossic variants, even within a given stretch of discourse or a single sentence. It does, however, predict that mixing will be judged negatively. That seems to be the case. Because the gap is great or at least ideologically salient, mixing H and L forms draws attention. Singh claims teachers mark down those students who mix calit and s;a\dhu bha\s>a in school writings (1986: 433). Thus teachers enforce a kind of linguistic purism in the interest of maintaining the stratification of forms which characterizes diglossia per se.

The linkages between diglossia and particular forms of social structure and practice make diglossia a heuristic notion, providing a perspective on Bengali culture complementary to that presented in the historical literature reviewed above. The notion of diglossia helps us reexamine the relation of language to religion and ideology, and the relationship of literacy to status. Chatterjee's two-dimensional model of Bengali "diglossia," in moving the concept to a higher level of complexity, problematizes its basic claims. Whereas Ferguson's model would predict that prestige should attach to archaic forms evocative of a literary tradition, Chatterjee rightly points out that Bengalis (often rural in origin) whose speech preserves some long s;a\dhu forms do not thereby gain prestige.

Chatterjee's analysis of Bengali diglossia is much more satisfying than a simplistic equating of s;a\dhu with H. Still, the actual expressions by which urban HCB speakers evaluate L varieties deserves more attention. Dhaka elites regard their own speech-- and Hi s;a\dhu writing-- as unmixed or pure. During my first days in Bangladesh, my Western-educated friend, Siraj, described the speech which Chatterjee calls LSB as a degraded mixture of archaic-literate grammar with a lexicon suited to the poverty of the speakers (my paraphrase). Siraj's objections point to the conflicting prestige values associated with the blended elements of rural speech-- H grammar and L lexicon. Diglossia is largely about language attitudes linked with class and literacy. Chatterjee's complication of the concept only adds to its usefulness in modeling dimensions of Bengali sociolinguistics. Still, at least in relation to Bengali, no model has been developed which stretches the notion of diglossia to incorporate its relation to religion and ideology.

The mystification of Bengali diglossia--Language ideologies in academia and language planning

The obfuscation of diglossia-religion links by 1986 sociolinguists

Overview

I have reviewed two of the literatures describing the Bengali language. Reading the Bengali diglossia literature after the history of Bengali language and religion is like being on the other side of a mirror. The opacity is striking. To anyone familiar with the history of the subcontinent, the relationship of communal-linguistic heritage to diglossia is plain. a) Religion and power are clearly linked, as are b) literacy and status; crucially, the two pairs (a) and (b) have also been linked in the history of Bengal. Yet even when data being cited are filled with communalist sentiments, the relationship of a literacy and class-based language gap to the competing civilizational forces at work in Bengal-- Hindu, Muslim, and Euro-colonial-- is obscured in the 1986 papers.

Is a Sanskritic lexicon a good index of H? All evaluations are positioned

A good example to start with is the place of Sanskrit ta\tsa\ma\s in Bengali varieties. Chatterjee and many others have seen Sanskritic lexemes as an index of the "pedantic," or H, s;a\dhu bha\s>a\. H's use of Sanskritic roots has been considered diagnostic even by those working before or apart from the diglossia concept. Yet, the equation of Sanskrit with prestige is problematic. Haq, in his role as revisionist historian and apologist for Bengali, was constrained to emphasize those figures in its history who most effectively used non-Sanskrit borrowings. "The Islamic atmosphere created by Nazrul in his poems, by the use of new words from Arabic and Persian, as well as the re-creation by him of Islamic ideas in Bengali and the use of similes and metaphors that remind of Muslim classics in other languages, are closer to their spirit, set in a new fashion in Bengali poetry" (Haq 1957: 213f). Haq and others advocated the self-conscious development of a standard which turned not to Sanskrit but to Islamicate languages for its prestigious importations.9

Here we see the blindness of these historians of Bengali to the elitism so intertwined with those imaginations of community which draw heavily on tongues distant in space or time (Anderson 1991). Religio-ideological motivations for importing obscure words into Bengali are not subjected to serious theorization in the diglossia literature. Yet, surely the play of various religious traditions is a key facet of the diglossia which Singh (1986: 431) finds in all the Indian languages. Given the importance of elite nurture of Sanskrit and Persian literary traditions in Bengal and much of the subcontinent, religiously motivated linguistic "reforms" have directly shaped diglossia.10 It is therefore remarkable that the tug-of-war between Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic should be neglected in the Bengali diglossia literature. Perhaps the thundering silence of recent sociolinguistic writings by Hindu and Muslim alike on this tug-of-war indicates the degree to which diglossia is a sensitive issue in a continent which has reason to fear ongoing communal violence. Fear and violence frighten away insight; thus fear fuels ideological distortion. For this or other reasons, academic voices fail to acknowledge that Bengali supersaturated with either Perso-Arabic or Sanskritic borrowings is not understood without specialized training. No one grows up speaking such H registers and few ever grow comfortable with them.11

Afia Dil on diglossia and language planning

What Afia Dil (1986) lacks in terms of an analytic model of Bengali diglossia comparable to Chatterjee's is compensated by her empirical data on diglossia in the spoken Bengali used in Bangladesh. Among the 1986 sociolinguists, Dil makes the most effort to situate diglossia within history. Her narration of the evolution of language practices and policy in the East Pakistan period evinces a perspective which adds greatly to the historical summary of Pakistan I presented above. Dil provides insights into the gap between the recommendations and actual practices of language policy makers in East Pakistan and later Bangladesh. Yet she fails to make explicit the ideological underpinnings of the historical actions she describes and set her own position apart from the communalist ideology of her bureaucratic subjects. Thus, despite her contributions, Dil exemplifies the mystification of history and ideology which I argue characterizes the 1986 papers.

After partition, the provincial government of East Pakistan appointed the East Bengal Language Committee with Mawlana Akram Khan as its Chair (Umar 1970: 275). Those were heady days, with Bengali Muslims feeling liberated from the superposed Calcutta standard in which they could never become fluent (Chowdhury 1960: 75). The policy goals which the Committee promulgated, summarized under the banner s;ahaj ba\m>la\ (Simple Bengali), were as follows: "i) that the Sanskritization of the language be avoided as far as possible by the use of simple phraseology and easy construction. . ., ii) that the expressions and sentiments of Muslim writers should strictly conform to the Islamic ideology [sic]; and iii) that the words, idioms and phrases in common use in East Bengal especially those in the Puthi and the popular literatures be introduced in the language more freely." [After this direct quote, Dil goes on to paraphrase other goals: (iv) to simplify the orthography and v) simplify the grammatical metalanguage, involving a decision paralleling #1 that] unintelligible technical terms of Sanskrit 'be substituted by [sic] the simple non-technical terms of Bengali language'" (Dil 1986: 454, citing and translating Chowdhury).

Many of the fascinating bits of discourse presented by Dil call for a level of analysis not provided in her article. By failing to analyze the ideologies underlying the discourse of the well-known language planners quoted, Dil not only leaves important stones unturned but gives the impression that she shares those ideologies. First, in regards to the third goal above, note the ambiguity surrounding the phrase "in common use." In the context of that goal as written, the "use" in mind is in "popular" literature. However, we might question the extent to which the "idioms and phrases" of the Puthi and Musalmani tracts were indeed "in common use" even in the speech of regional Muslims, let alone their non-Muslim neighbors.

The second example is the partially translated discourse of Principal Ibrahim Khan, a member of the East Bengal Language Committee.12 In the passage Dil cites, Khan echoes the EBLC's call for some sort of "simplification" of Bengali. But Khan and Dil collude in confusing linguistic realities and ideologies. Khan's use of "we" exemplifies the way pronouns facilitate the creation of imagined communities when he writes, "we shouldn't even say /khaibo/ we should say /khabo/, for that is what we say ordinarily. /khaibo/ is the s;a\dhu bha\s>a\ " (Dil 1986: 455).13 If by "we" Khan meant "we the elite who still speak Hi Calit Bengali (even after a political breakoff from its Calcutta source), then it is true that "we" do not "ordinarily" say /khaibo/. The implicit generalization that the stem suffix /i/ is absent in all "ordinary" speech, however, is not true of LSB-- the speech of most Bangladeshis. This confusion of facts clouds the claim of Khan to be resisting a "conspiracy of the educated class [which despises] 'the dialect of the common man'" (Dil 1986: 456; internal quote is Khan's).

Let me provide some background for the third example. In the Pakistan era, the Bengali Academy undertook intensive projects in dialectology and lexicography. One result was the three volume Dictionary of East Pakistani dialects (Shahidullah 1965). Visions for the replacement of the Calcutta standard were not homogeneous even among the projects' leaders. Shahidullah noted the seeming dissolution of the single standard after partition; he did not see the vacuum being filled by any one dialect, e.g. that of Dhaka. He and others involved in the project hoped "his dictionary might be instrumental in bringing about a national linguistic cohesion among the people with various dialectical backgrounds" (Dil 1986: 460). The communalist dualism of the director of the Bengali Academy, Syed Ali Ahsan, who wrote the preface to the dictionary, seems more strident than Shahidullah's. Ahsan's preface attacked earlier Bengali dictionaries which theirs was to displace at least in the dialectology of East Bengal. Dil's indirect citation of Ahsan shares his ideology in a way that seems dangerously unconscious or inexplicit, illustrating the tendency of all indirect discourse to blur the line between two authors:

[He objects that] dialectal wordsÉhad been left out as being asa\dhu 'incorrect.' Moreover, the dictionary writers had, without any twinge of conscience, not only left out the Perso-Arabic words used by the public but they had also entered many Sanskrit words in the dictionaryÉ [as an] attemptÉ to use 'Panditi Bangla' or scholarly language which was more often than not the Sanskritized Bangla (Dil 1986: 459).​

Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages - Google Books
Banglapedia

Meherullah, Munshi Mohammad (1861-1907) poet, religious leader and social reformer, was born in his maternal grandfather’s home in Ghopegram under Kaliganj thana of jessoredistrict. His paternal home was in Chhatiantala of the same district.

Meherullah received his religious education from Moulvi Mosharuddin of Jessore, and from Moulvi Mohammad Ismail he learned Arabic, Persian and Urdu. He had never been to any educational institution. He received education privately. He was well versed in the Holy quranand hadith. After a short stint in government service, he received training in tailoring and started a tailoring shop in jessore. When Christian missionaries tried to malign Islam and hazrat muhammad (Sm), Meherullah protested through his speeches and writings. He engaged in a number of public debates with missionaries. Gradually he devoted himself to spreading the message of Islam and soon became popular as an orator.

Speaking on the glorious past of Islam at several religious functions in Assam and Bengal, Munshi Mohammad Meherullah tried to inspire the frustrated and morally debilitated Muslim society. He was able to bring back to the fold of Islam many Muslims who had been converted tochristianity. With a view to spreading the teaching of islam, he established Madrasaye Karamatia and Islam Dharmottejika Sabha (1889) in Manoharpur village in Jessore. He used to contribute regularly to newspapers like the sudhakar and the islampracharak published from Kolkata. His notable books on religion and society are Khristiya Dharmer Asarata (The hollowness of the Christian religion) (1887), Bidhabagavjana O Bisadbhandar (Sufferings of Widows, 1894), Meherul Islam (1897), Hindu Dharma Rahasya O Devalila (1898, two editions) and Mussalman O Christian Tarkayuddha (Muslim and Christian Debates, 1908; two editions). The government confiscated Bidhabaganjana O Bisadbhandar, which described the sufferings of Hindu widows, and Hindu Dharma Rahasya O Devalila, which criticised the various superstitions of Hindus, on charges of indecency and communalism. He died on 7 May in 1907. [Mohsin Hussain]

 

[Saiful Islam]

Not to come across rude akhi, what is this thread about? I've read the title but need more elaboration lol

 

[kalu_miah]

Not to come across rude akhi, what is this thread about? I've read the title but need more elaboration lol

Bangla language has a rich history of mixture with Persian, Arabic and Turkic languages, just like Urdu, this we can see from the old Puthi literature language, which was called dobhasi (dual) or mixed languages by later Hindu literati's. But that kind of "mixed" language was used by masses and the elite for everyday use, for everyone concerned Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, that was the language in use at the time. But this "dobhasi or mixed" language was later transformed when English rule started in Bengal in 1757:
Bengali renaissance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bengali literature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bangladesh – ‘Hinduized’ via Bangla language | Rehmat's World

Bangladesh – ‘Hinduized’ via Bangla language
Posted on February 26, 2009 | 10 Comments

Last December, the Urdu-speaking Muslims living in Bangladesh were given the right to vote since the separation of Eastern wing of Pakistan by local majority party, Awami League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rehman (killed in a military coup in 1975) under Hindu tanks in 1971. He named the former East Pakistan province –Bangladesh or “Bangla country” (borrowing the Zionists’ concept of Palestine for “Jewish people” only). Mujib declared Hindu religious days as ‘national holidays’ and used to attend all Hindu festivals personally.

An unbaised reader of Indian sub-Continent will find that under British occupation of India – both Bangla and Urdu languages were turned into sort of racist cult – with the differnce that while Urdu-speaking conmmunities based their identities both on Islam and language – the Bangla-speaking communities have no religious bariers – Muslims, Hindus and Buddhist are all considered part of the same ‘Bangla Brotherhood’ as long as they speak Bangla and are born in India’s West Bangal or Bangladesh. In order to abolish such racism – based on language or birth land – which is against Islamic teachings – Quaid-e-Azam (a Gujrati-speaking Muslim) declared Urdu as Pakistan’s official language, though the majority of Pakistani population in 1947, was Bangla-speaking. However, after February 21, 1952 language riots at Dhaka University resulting in the death of three students – Bangla language was made into ‘lanuage Holocaust’.

There are 160 million Bangla-speaking population (82% Muslims, 16% Hindus and the rest Christians and Buddhists) – while India has more than 75 million Bangla-speaking population in West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, and state of Jharkhand. Some Indian leaders suggested to Mujib that if he could get a divorce from Pakistan – India maybe willing to let its province of West Bangal merge with Bangladesh – in order to unite the two Bangals, which the All India National Congress fought to get divided fearing being a Muslim-majority province under British Raj – its people may prefer to join the newly created Pakistan.

Persian was the official language during the Mughal Empire in Hindustan. During that period, Urdu (meaning army in Persian) was evolved out of Arabic, Persian and Turkish speaking Muslims who established Muslim rule in Indian sub-Continent. A great number of Urdu words became part of Bangla grammar. It was William Carey (1761-1834), an English missionary, who Sanskritized Bangla language between 1800 and 1813 with the help of Brahimin intellectuals. British imperialists made it compulsary for Muslims to learn this Sanskritized Bangla language to join government services. The Christian-Hindu agenda was to convert the former Muslim ruling class into tailors, boatment, peasants and rickshawalas . After division of India into two sovereign states, the anti-Muslim Hindu elites in India – went for the big kill – to Hinduized Muslims via Bangla language. However, their hatred of Bangla language is obvious from the fact that while Bangla is official language of Bangladseh – 75 million Bangla-speaking Indian citizens (25% Muslims) in West Bengal – have failed to get Bangla to be recognized as one of the state languages of India. In fact, New Delhi has refused to issue a postage stamp with Bangla script on it.

The Hindu crusaders believe that by Sanskritizing Bangla language they will be able to de-Islamize Bangla population. There is no shortage of ‘Islamophobes’ on both sides – Sufia Kamal, Nilima Ibrahim, Ali Ahsan, Shamsur Rahman, Kabir Chaudhry (Minister of Education under Mujib) and Kudrate-e Khoda (communist Chairman of the Bangladesh Education Commission) to name a few. Bangla Islamists were mostly killed by the thugs of pro-India Rakshi Bahini militia. Islamic academic in Universities were replaced by Mujib’s trusties, the Tagorites, the anarchists and the communists. Muslim history books were polluted with Hindu ones. The literary works of anti-Islam Hindu writers such as Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Samar Sen (1916-1987) and Sri Krishna-Kirtan instead of Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) or Abdul Kadi (1906-1984) - have become part of Bangla literature in Universities.

Some of the Islamic terminoloy purged from school textbooks included Allah, Rasul, Nabi, Hajj, Wudu, Azan, Mu’azin, Ka’aba, Jihad, etc. etc.

It’s interesting to note that All India Muslim League was born in Dhaka in 1906 – and the “Pakistan Resolution” that called for the creation of an independent Muslim State in Indian sub-Continent – was proposed by A.K. Fazlul Haq, a Bangla leader on March 23, 1940.

The current prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajed is the daughter of slain ‘Father of the Nation’ Sheikh Mujibur Rehman – and the only member of the family not killed in 1975 military coup for being out of country (in India).

And finally, here is a ‘conspiracy theory’ by a paranoid Hindu Zionist – who believe that Pakistan (ISI) and Bangladesh (DGFI) intelligence services are planning to split India by linking the two Muslim-majority countries through a northern corridor in India and naming it Mughalistan. As usual, the ignorant Zionist creep don’t want to admit that the Mughal Muslim dynasty ruled the entire Indian sub-continent and the present-day Afghanistan for several centuries.

 

[Saiful Islam]

Once true information and culture is buried/misconstrued, the masses will never know or only few will know about it...What a shame.

 

[khair_ctg]

I'm cross posting this from Bangladesh protests Pakistan Parliament resolutions | Page 43

- it sort of comes as an enigma to me how did one generation of Bengali Muslims (besides earlier generations obviously) in many ways champion the cause of a separated Muslim homeland, only for the next generation to work to completely overturn that?

- since the defeat at Plassey (1757), the system that developed under British rule fuelled a Brahmin Bengali class to accumulate immense wealth and land, and dominate technical and literary development. what is called a ‘Bengali Renaissance’ was essentially a Brahmin affair. during this time, East Bengal, once a thriving Mughal economy, slowly decayed as did the Muslims. it was during then that education in science was relegated to a diminishing and relatively well off class of Muslims; illiteracy and poverty prevailed. education in Muslim high culture became part of an increasingly powerless Muslim educated class. pathsalas became the places to study instead of maktabs. ‘Bengali’ language and culture became overridden with Hindu culture. Muslims' inclination towards Arabi, Farsi, Urdu for literary purposes like olden times continued. i'm assuming here that a Musalman/Sultani Bengali could not get too strong a foothold amid all these factors combined.

- turn of 20th century provided a break for Bengali Muslims with advent of Muslim League and opening of a university in East Bengal.

- fastforward to post-1947: well-educated Hindus who used to administer East Bengal all this time mostly left for Calcutta (the same happened for Lahore but you are fortunate that the 'Calcutta' of Punjab went to the Muslims). the few who remained became influential parts of the academia, media and leftist politics of East Pakistan-East Bengal. the seeds of hatred against West Pakistan were being sowed – in the same parcel Bengali Muslim culture was turned into ‘foreign culture’ that ‘they’ were ‘imposing’ on ‘us’. what many newly educated Bengali Muslims adopted as their own were in fact gifts of the Brahmin Renaissance – from folklore to poetry to other social prose, from Nihan Ranjan to Madhusudan Dutta to Sarat Chandra to Tagore, and from literature like Gopal Bhar to Devdas to Galpaguccha. and these tendencies were not even divided along socio-economic classes of Muslims, but along generations. for example in just one educated Bengali family, if pre-1947 generation was dominated by Urdu and Farsi scholars, the generation that matured post-1947 was more steeped in ‘Bengali’ education. as a result when earlier generation was into Allama Iqbal, latter more politically-charged generation was into Bankim Chandra. if older Bengalis tried to initiate a counter-narrative, they were essentially going against a political tide at that time and no match for the historically well-educated well-entrenched Hindus.

- these societal tendencies post-1947, although devastating, never really "washed away" the people and facts of the Pakistan Movement from the memories or psyches. and i don't think they have been washed away even today despite efforts against it, and a lot of blood spilled around 1970 and also after 1971 definitely did a lot of damage. you possibly already know about the violence pre-March 1971 and post-1971 suppression of Muslim League, Nizam-e-Islam, Democratic Party of Nurul Amin, other Muslim oriented parties (@@Md Akmal).
- in these events, former-West Pakistan comes in at phases and (maybe i'm being Bengal-centric here) i wish it had a more helpful role.

here is an interesting link. i don't agree with it completely but it is somewhat related
Bengali Muslims are new (?) | Brown Pundits

 

[kalu_miah]

http://www2.nau.edu/~jmw22/cv/ArabicLoanwords.pdf
(note: some words did not translate in coding properly, if the text below is not legible, please look at the original pdf file in link above)

People often make particular linguistic variants straightforward indexes of identity. This lacks analytic validity but reveals the linguistic ideologies upon which the politics of nationalism often turn (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Following Stewart (2001), we should be cautious of modern notions that linguistic form (e.g., Bengali discourse full of Sanskrit- or Perso-Arabic-derived words) directly reflects an author’s politico-religious stance or a Hindu or Muslim identity conceived as a pure essence. Ask Bangladeshis what divides Muslim from Hindu speech and they will mention pani (vs. j–l) ‘water’. This favorite index actually derives from Sanskrit. Yet, the “Muslim” valeur of pani is a social fact. Such facts warrant attention to ideological representations of “Perso-Arabic” lexemes in Bengali – and suggest that lists of loanwords require reanalysis in terms of ideologies.

1 . Semantic domains

The semantic categories of Arabic loanwords in Bengali reveal the history of Bengali Islam. “The ordinary Bengali words for ‘paper’ kagaj (Arabic kaoead) and ‘pen’ kolom (Arabic qalam) [are] both . . . corrupted loanwords” (Eaton 1993:
293). Muslims spread literacy in Bengal, and associated terms reflect that fact. Bengali Muslim kin terms are also mostly Arabic. Muslims usually call fathers abba; Hindus use baba. Some loanwords like mullah or imàm designate Muslim social categories or reflect institutions of Mughal governance, e.g. the (now honorific) title qà∂ì (kàzì). Then there are labels designating high birth – sayyid, sheikh, ashraf – which played a significant role in Bengal’s social history (Ahmed 1981). Bengali Muslims use different honorifics from Hindus, e.g. “Saheb (like ‘Mister’). Muslim names are also typically Arabic. The 19th-century Islamization of Bengal involved rural Muslims rejecting their “Hindu” (Bengali) names (Ahmed 1981:106). Other salient loanwords denote ritual acts – e.g. ™ajj. In late 20th century Dhaka, Bengali newspapers were peppered with such terms; their use peaks during Ramadan. Musa (1995:93) lists 28, including akheri munajat ‘final prayer’, id mobàrak ‘happy Id’, zakàt ‘alms’, janàza ‘funeral prayer’, and mìlàd mahfil ‘gathering to celebrate [the Prophet’s] birth’.

2 . Phonology and grammatical categories of loanwords

Phonological nativization of loanwords has been the rule in the past. Arabic /a/ in unstressed syllables has followed Bengali rules of vowel harmony to become /o/ in syllables preceding a high vowel (/u/ or /i/). Arabic consonants were generally replaced with their closest Bengali counterparts. The spelling of Arabic-derived terms has recently undergone “reform”. The Islamic Preaching Mission, once the Toblig Jamat, is now the Tablig Jamayat; mowlanas are now mawlanas, at least in writing (Musa 1995:93).Most Arabic loanwords are nouns, typically appearing in otherwise purely Bengali contexts and receiving Bengali affixation (masjid-e, ‘in the mosque’) rather than Arabic morphology such as the definite article. Phrases like biss–-ijtemà≠ ‘world gathering’ or ßiyàm-sadh–na ‘fasting-asceticism’ that join Arabic loanwords with Sanskrit derivatives are common. The 17thcentury rise in non-nominal Arabic elements borrowed into Bengali was reversed in the 18th century – probably reflecting the declining fortunes of Persian under British hegemony (Mannan 1966:73). Among the non-nominal borrowings is the Arabic Ωàhir, used by the early 18th-century poet Vidyapati (Mannan 1966:67) in a verb phrase karilo Ωàhir ‘make manifest’. This illustrates the way Arabic loanwords can appear in Bengali verb phrases by virtue of the latter’s capacity to form compound verbs using nouns or adjectives and the Bengali pro-verb kar ‘do.’

3 . Counts and frequency of Arabic and Islamicate elements in Bengali

There are no large corpus-based linguistic studies of Bengali, let alone of the frequency of Perso-Arabic terms in actual instances of contemporary Bengali discourse. Writing in pre-Partition Calcutta, S.K. Chatterji counted 2,500 Perso-
Arabic terms in Bengali (Chatterji 1934:210; Ahmed 1981:121). Writing 30 years later in Islamic East Pakistan, Hilali (1967) listed 9,000 such loanwords. But the relation of such “counts” to actual usage is unknown. We find a range of loanword frequencies in a small corpus of carefully transcribed, naturally occurring Bengali speech of various registers. In “Latifa’s” 1992 lament (Wilce 1998) only 6 per-cent of total word tokens were Perso-Arabic loans. By contrast, in the Bengali “translation” of an Arabic prayer offered at a 1991 wedding (Wilce 2002), about 33 percent of the total words are Arabic loans. Arabic-laden prayers and other speech registers – and metadiscourses on the frequency of loanwords – reflect linguistic ideologies inseparable from postcoloniality and competing nationalisms (Irvine and Gal 2000). Such ideologies played a clear role in the history of Bengali.

4 . History and historiography

Apparently, it was the Hindu poet Bharat Chandra in his poem Mansingha Kàvya (1752) who coined the term dobhasi Bangla ‘dual language’ (Haq 1957:174) for a register using many Perso-Arabic loanwords. Some dobhasi literature was written in the nasta≠liq script, or in Bengali written from right to left. Haq argues that dobhaßi reflects the 19th-century Wahhabi movement in southern Bengal. Abdul Mannan, who wrote the definitive treatment of dobhaßi literature in 1966, sees its origins in earlier Mughal patronage of Bengali. The first work on record “which has preserved evidence of the influence of the language of Muslim rulers [on Bengali] is the Mansavijay of Bipradàs Piplài”, a Brahmin (ca. 1495 C.E., Mannan 1966:59). Bharat Chandra wrote the following
(from Onn–dam–ng–l): na r–be pr–sad gun/. [Persian, Arabic, Hindustani] na h–be r–sal lack grace and poetic quality. ot eb o kohi bhaßa I have chosen, therefore, the yaboni misal the mixed language of the Muslims. ye hok se hok bhaßa The ancient sages have kavyo r–s l–ye declared: “Any language may be used. The important thing is poetic quality” (Mannan 1966: 69–70; emphasis added)

This precolonial aesthetic of mixture gave way to a drive for purification. In the 19th century, dobhaßi Bengali borrowed even more Perso-Arabic lexemes, perhaps (ironically) reflecting forces unleashed by Halhed’s (1969/1778) Grammar of the Bengal Language. Halhed considered foreign elements pollutants in the “pure Bengalese”. He acknowledged “the modern [mixed] jargon of the kingdom” but declared the loanwords unintelligible outside large cosmopolitan towns (1969:xiv). Following Halhed’s lead, British Orientalists and Hindu pundits working in Calcutta (Ft. William College) produced a Sanskritized register successfully promulgated as “standard Bengali”. The intensification of Perso-Arabic borrowings in 19th-century dobhaßi was thus a reaction to Orientalism and the Sanskritization of Bengali. As emerging Hindu and Muslim leaders competed for populist appeal, they declared the others’ favored register (Sanskritized vs. dobhaßi)“unintelligible to the masses”. Some of Halhed’s successors – e.g. William Carey – at least for a time rejected linguistic purism. “A multitude of words, originally Persian or Arabic, are constantly employed in common conversation, which perhaps ought to be considered as enriching rather than corrupting the language” (Carey 1801:iii; emphasis in original). But Qayyum (1981) notes that later editions of Carey’s Grammar omitted these words. Around 1850, British missionary James Long dubbed the Islamized form of Bengali “Musalman Bengali” (later called Musalmani Bangla – a form relevant to producing targeted translations of the Bible). Around 1900, members of the Hindu Bengali intelligentsia, such as Dinesh Chandra Sen and Rabindranath Tagore, made “Bengali literature” central to their “romantic nationalism” (Chakrabarty 2004). They believed that “the national [Bengali] literature” could engender a mystical union of the divergent groups of Bengali speakers, transcending the Hindu-Muslim divide. While they somewhat naively advocated this vision, Muslims in the united British Indian state of Bengal formed a Muslim Literary Association (1911), sensing that the Bengal Literary Academy (formed in 1893) was in some subtle way simply a “Hindu Bengali Literature Society”. But it was subtle. Hindu romantic nationalists did not advocate anything like the expurgation of Perso-Arabic words from Bengali. That was not what alienated Muslim literary figures. What the Hindu romanticists did so successfully was to promulgate a lexically Sanskritized Bengali that somehow appeared to be both the unmarked form of the language and the prestige variety.

5 . Muslim attitudes to official support of Bengali

Colonial control required understanding and ranking various forms of Bengali. Two visions competed, ascribing to Bengali an enduring Hindu “essence” or a growing Islamic influence. The first branded Musalmani “unintelligible”. The second
prompted colonial officers and some Muslim leaders to propose a “separate language” for Bengali Muslims (Ahmed 1981:122). But colonial intelligentsia made Sanskritized Bengali represent not only a primordial essence but a prestige standard. Muslim opposition even to a Musalmani variety was a reaction to the putative Hindu essence of Bengali and to Musalmani’s reputation as an “unsophisticated patois” (Ahmed 1981:126; cf. Qayyum 1981). That some (not all, Anisuzzaman 1996) Muslims of the mid-20th century rejected Bengali language education indicates Bengali had become a bone of contention. Today, Bengali historians debate whether Partition was the fruit of the Raj’s divide and conquer policy or the resolution of “essential” differences. Metadiscourses about Bengali are part of that tortured history.

6 . The status of Bengali in the East Pakistan and → Bangladesh eras

After Partition, the provincial East Pakistan government appointed an East Bengal Language Committee whose policy goals, summarized under the banner s–h–j bangla ‘Simple Bengali’, were: “i) that . . . Sanskritization . . . be avoided as far as possible by the use of simple phraseology . . .; ii) that . . . expressions and sentiments of Muslim writers should strictly conform to . . . Islamic ideology; and iii) that the words, idioms and phrases in common use in East Bengal, especially those in the Puthi . . . literatures be introduced in the language more freely” (Chowdhury 1960, as translated by Dil 1986:454). The reference to the dobhaßi Puthi literature makes clear that the “idioms . . . in common use” were Perso-Arabic. Pakistan had strong motivations for replacing Sanskritic with Islamicate derivatives. Appeals to linguistic “simplicity” may sound democratic but, in Pakistan and elsewhere, often serve other agendas (Bauman and Briggs 2003). In the late 1980s, Arabic expressions began displacing Persian ones among Muslim Bangladeshis; Muslims began using allàh ™àfiΩ rather than the Persian xoda ™àfiΩ ‘go[o]db[ewith]ye’. In 1995, Bangla Academy Director Monsur Musa wrote:
“Nowadays, in certain Bengali newspapers, an eagerness to substitute Arabic words for prevailing Persian terms can be seen. These newspapers use ßalàt instead of namaz, ßiyàm instead of roja – and allàh is considered better than xoda”
(1995:92; translation mine).

Musa noted that the Arabic words in announcements of religious events made them quite hard for the average Bengali to understand – an echo of older claims?

7. Conclusion

While for some, proliferating loanwords represent an impure accretion on the language of the land of Bengal, for others they can signal the true identity of the Bangladeshi nation-state – an Islamic identity (Farukkhi 1990). And there are many positions in between, for example those who celebrate Bengali authors’ playful use of Perso-Arabic loanwords (Anisuzzaman 1996). The contemporary Bengali scene is a broad span over rapidly moving pani.

Bibliographical references

Ahmed, Rafiuddin. 1981. The Bengal Muslims, 1871– 1906: A quest for identity. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Anisuzzaman. 1996. “The Bengali language as a vehicle of creativity: After 1952”. Contemporary Bengali writing: Literature in Bangladesh, Bangladesh period, ed. K.S. Murshid, 243–250. Dhaka: University Press Limited.

Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of modernity: Language ideologies and the politics of inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carey, William. 1801. A grammar of the Bengalee language. Serampore: Mission Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2004. “Romantic archives: Literature and the politics of identity in Bengal”. Critical Inquiry 30:3.654–683.

Chatterji, Suniti Kumar. 1934. The origin and development of the Bengali language, I. London: Allen and Unwin.

Chowdhury, Munier. 1960. “The language problem in East Pakistan”. Linguistic diversity in South Asia: Studies in regional, social, and functional variation, ed. Charles A. Ferguson and John J. Gumperz, 64–80.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Dil, Afia. 1986. “Diglossia in Bangla: A study of shifts in the verbal repertoire of the educated classes in Dhaka, Bangladesh”.

The Fergusonian impact. II. Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, ed. Joshua Fishman, 451–465.

Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Farrukhi, Asif Aslam. 1990. “Images in a broken mirror: The Urdu scene in Bangladesh”. Annual of Urdu Studies 7.83–87.

Halhed, Nathaniel B. 1969. A grammar of the Bengal language, 1778. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press.

Haq, Muhammad Enamul. 1957. Muslim Bengali literature. Karachi: Pakistan Publications.

Hilali, Shaikh Ghulam Maqsud and Muhammad Enamul Haq. 1967. Perso-Arabic elements in Bengali.

Dhaka: Central Board for Development of Bengali.

Irvine, Judith and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language ideology and linguistic differentiation”. Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, ed. P. Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe: School of American Research.

Mannan, Qazi Abdul. 1966. The emergence and development of Dobhàsì literature in Bengal (up to 1855 A.D.). Dacca: Department of Bengali and Sanskrit, University of Dacca.

Musa, Monsur. 1995. Bàn. làde“er ràstrabhaßà [The state language of Bangladesh]. Dhaka: Bangla Academy.

Qayyum, Muhammad Abdul. 1982. A critical study of the early Bengali grammars: Halhed to Haughton. Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.

Stewart, Tony K. 2001. “In search of equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu encounter through translation theory” History of Religions 40:3.261–288.

Wilce, James M. 1998. Eloquence in trouble: The poetics and politics of complaint in rural Bangladesh. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 2002. “Tunes rising from the soul and other narcissistic prayers: Contested realms in Bangladesh”.

Everyday life in South Asia, ed. D. Mines and S. Lamb, 289–302. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

James M. Wilce (Northern Arizona University)

 

[kalu_miah]

cross posted:
Bangladesh protests Pakistan Parliament resolutions | Page 42

Lets looks at some facts on Urdu:
Urdu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- Persian was the official language in most of South Asia till 1837, when it was changed to English and Urdu
- Urdu could have become more wide spread in Bangladesh landmass if Pakistan was not broken, but India engineered the breakup of Pakistan and Indian agent Awami League were adamant about not just removing Urdu but English as well as medium of instruction in newly "independent" Bangladesh
- today Urdu's alter ego, Sanskritized Urdu aka Hindi is getting popular instead due to Bollywood, TV etc.

What we need to remember is that Bangladesh landmass was an integral part of Northeastern South Asia and this border is a new phenomenon that only became a barrier to free movement in 1947. So before 1947, people traveled freely and settled down wherever they found some advantage of doing so.

Who were the rulers of Bengal since advent of Muslim rule and what languages did they speak:
- initially most were Turkic, speaking some Siberian Turkic language, many among them also knew Persian as it was the Lingua Franca in their home region of Central Asia in those times
- Persians were also present in large numbers as bureaucrats and high officials
- Mughals (Turko-Mongols) spoke Chagatai Turki (close to todays Uzbek and Uighur) as mother tongue and Persian as official court language
- Urdu came into picture much later I think around late 18th century, as it evolved to become the common language for most Muslim ruling class in South Asia, as a mixture of local Delhi Khariboli as the base and Persian, Arabic and Turkic loan words added to this base. I guess with genetic mixing of migrant and local population, language also got mixed as a result. But it happened really late, only in 1837 Persian was replaced with Urdu and English as official language.

Now lets look at what happened to the Turkic people and their languages and scripts:
- during Muslim rule, before they went under Russian Imperial rule (except Ottoman), most used Arabic script while speaking their different versions of Turkic languages, Anatolian, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uighur
- today here is the status:
Anatolian (Turkey): dropped Arabic script for Latin (English) during Kemal's ultra secular europeanization program to get close to Europe
Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz - use Russian Cyrillic script introduced by Russian rulers, but some have plans to adopt Latin following Turkey, now that they are "independent"
Uighur, Kyrgyz and Kazakh living in China's Xinjiang: Chinese Communist party rulers changed their script from Arabic to English, allegedly, to reduce their ties with Islam, but when they started becoming highly proficient in English, due to familiarity of script, I heard the script was promptly changed back to Arabic (someone told me, may be some Chinese poster can give a more accurate account)

Language is a treasure for any group of human beings, as it is a huge part of group identity, but it is not the sole factor. That is why Punjab and Bengal were partitioned despite having common language. Religion at least in South Asia trumps language.

Also, the main purpose of language is communication. If Pakistan was still intact, I would support promoting Urdu in Bangladesh landmass, just as it is being done in Pakistan, as a common medium of communication between the entire population who speak many different mother tongue. But for Bangladesh, since 1971, that requirement has ended. So at this point, although we have some Urdu speakers and many Bengali's can speak Urdu/Hindi, I see no great importance for this in Bangladesh for the foreseeable future.

For Bangladesh:
- Bangla will serve as the main language as most of the population knows this as mother tongue, and others can speak it
- English will remain our most important second language
- Arabic should be promoted as the third language
- we should promote Arabic as well as English script (alphabets) in addition to our traditional Bangla (Devnagari style) script, and add loan word from these two languages replacing sanskrit words, as much as possible

Why these additional scripts, this is because English as a global language is important for all nations, and it is very easy to use in computers (we already do it as it is so practical, Amra Evabe Bangla Likhi). Secondly, why Arabic scripts, because 500 million strong majority Sunni Muslim Arab world will remain our most important ally, more than any other nation or group of nations and it will help us to read and understand Qur'an better.

Please note that changing script or adding loan words does not mean that we loose a spoken language, it means that we are pragmatic and are willing to change according to our needs. We should learn from history, that we adapt to survive, we leave behind the past and embrace the future. For that future, neither Hindi nor Urdu is important for us as far as I can see.

Added later, in answer to a post from @Al-zakir , Urdu can of course be studied as an optional language like many other languages, as it will be useful for doing business or socializing with South Asian Muslims in India and Pakistan.

 

[Moander]

How can a language be Muslim or Hindu? Does Qur'an forbids using any language? Do you know that Arabic and Parsi had a long history to be used by non Muslims like every other language?

In Qur'an Allah said, "Now if We had made it a Quran in a non-Arabic tongue they would surely have said, "Why is it that its verses have not been made clear? Why - a foreign tongue and an Arab?" Say, "For those who accept it, this is a Guidance and medicine for a wholesome life. But as for those who will not believe (Arabs or non-Arabs), in their ears is deafness, and so it remains obscure to them. They are like people who are called to from afar." (Quran 41:44)

Every thing is created by Almighty Allah, its only the human & jinn who misuse them.

 

[jaunty]

How can a language be Muslim or Hindu?

Apparently there are two versions of Bangla-- Tagorized Bangla and Mulla Bangla. Go figure!

 

[scorpionx]

Arabic is the language of the holy book,but that does not mean this language was born to write the holy book. Do not understand what the hell is "Musalmani Bangla" though.

 

[LaBong]

Why don't you start speaking Urdu, Arab or whatever language you deem fit instead of mullahfication of Bangla. At least people will cease to tag yourselves as Bengali as well.

Arabic is the language of the holy book,but that does not mean this language was born to write the holy book. Do not understand what the hell is "Musalmani Bangla" though.

As far as I know, the dialect or form of Arabic which was used to write Quran is different than what is spoken today. Which is likely because language does evolve.

 

[oFFbEAT]

.....there cannot be any 'musalmani bangla'..

Bengali language(Bangla) was literally developed by Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar from Sanskrit and hugely enriched by Rabindranath Tagore and other eminent bengali polymaths.....

This is one of those Indian languages which the Arabic/Persian influence couldn't distort......

 

[scorpionx]

As far as I know, the dialect or form of Arabic which was used to write Quran is different than what is spoken today. Which is likely because language does evolve.

You are right. Google searched it. The holy text was written in classical Arabic. Can't imagine how would it look like if Bangladesh starts speaking in classical arabic.

 

[jaunty]

Today marks the beginning of a new era, the era of kalu miah's Musalmani Bangla.

 

[cloud_9]

WTH is Musalmani ? Is that even a word ?

Kalu Miah we know Bangladeshi Bengali has a lot of Turkish,Arabic and Farsi words because most of the Bangladeshi's are full,half or quarter Turkic,Arab or Persian.

We Indians are against foreign occupation of Bangladeshi lands in Turkey,GCC and Iran.It should be returned back to the real Turks,Arabs and Persian