Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/1005

 VII. ] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 959 countenanced. Even before any book had been published in Bengali prose except the Regulations and Vocabularies, Ram Basu’s Pratapaditya Charita came out in the year 1800. It has been urged by many people that Rama Mohana Roy in his sixteenth year (1790 A.D.) wrote a book in Bengali prose ‘‘against idolatry of all religions.” True, he wrote a pamphlet bearing that name, but it was written in Persian with an Arabic preface. The Vedanta Sutra was his first work in Bengali, and this appeared in 1815. In the Vedanta Sutra he himself refers toatranslation of Bhasaparichchheda in Bengali prose as having already existed before he began to write in Bengali.* We have mentioned several translations of the above work on Logic, while deal- ing with the old Bengali literature. If one reads the translations of the Bhasaparichchheda, the latest of which was written nearly a century before Rama Mohana Rov’s Vedanta Sutra, one will be struck with the similarity of language in the above treatises with the style of Rama Mohana Roy. The mis- sionaries had taken up Bengali, in right earnest, and they had required no impetus from the Raja in adopting the vernacular prose as the medium through which to approach the people of Bengal. But all these considerations hardly detract from the glory which attaches to the name of Raja Rama Mohana Roy for his furtherance of the cause of Bengali prose. The literary works by Europeans in Bengali were mostly translations, and whatever credit and reverence may be due to these authors for undertaking a task which required them to over-
 * Raja Rama Mohana Roy’s Bengali works, P. 267.