Friday, September 9, 2011

Indian Lierature (contd-1)

There was no prose literature in Bengali before the 19th century. Its beginning may be traced to the foundation of Fort William College in Calcutta in A.D. 1800 for training the English officials in different languages of the country.It had a Bengali section with William Carey as its head.Under the inspiration several Bengali books were written in prose between A.D. 1801and 1805.Carey himself composed a grammar of the Bengali language in 1801, Bengali-English dictionary in 1815,and other books besides the Bengali translation of the Bible.
The Bengali prose got further impetus from Raja (title Raja was offered by Mughal Empire) Rammohan Roy who propagated his heterodox views in a number of prose books and tracts. From this humble beginning a fine prose style was gradually evolved by the efforts of a large number of eminent writers.while the languages of upper India came under the domination of Arabic and Persian, the Bengali language looked for sustenance and development to the rich resources of Sanskrit and the spoken language of the people..The writers of the Bengali language also got a deep interest in English literature and thus changed totally the style and function of the constructions of Bengali literature. Thus the Bengali poetry which had  more than 500 years of wealth in construction only in religious topics took shapes and ideas of English literature  to express the relation of a man and the nature, a relation of a man with  other man. The new spirit manifested itself  in the development of the new type of literary products such as short stories, novel, drama, biography, history, general knowledge,  etc. The awakening of national consciousness and the application of a rational spirit in the discussion of religious, social, political and economic problems were much facilitated by the growth of the new type of literature.All these got the greatest stimulus by the growth of Bengali periodicals from A.D. 1818. The very first issue of the weekly "Samachar Darpan", first published on 23 May 1818. A new set of Bengali writers such as Ishwar Chanda Vidyasagar, BankimChandra Chatterjee, Rammohan Roy , Dwijendranath Thakur , Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutta etc began to serve the field of literature, science, politics, history and other branch of human expression.