Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/45

I.] and to establish its claims on the attention of scholars. It is curious to observe that, more than once in history, we have owed the development of our language to the influence of foreign people from whom such help was the least expected. Mr. Nathanial Prassy Halhed, a European member of the Indian Civil Service, wrote the earliest Bengali grammar for us in the eighteenth century; and Bengali prose, in our own days, owes a good deal to the impetus given to it by the European missionaries.

The other causes, which contributed to a rapid development of Bengali during the Mahomedan period, may be briefly summed up as follows:—


 * (2) The revival of Hinduism, which we have called in this book as the Paurānik Renaissance.


 * (3) The great Vaiṣṅava movement in Bengal in the sixteenth century.