Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/115

 EARLIEST EUROPEAN WRITERS 91 Forster, Senior Merchant on the Bengal Establish- ment.”' It is evident from the lengthy preface to this work as well as to that of Halhed that these early works were undertaken not on literary but also on political grounds. Bengali at this time, officially as well as popu- larly, was an unrecognised vernacular, and Forster rightly insists upon the absurdity and inconvenience of continuing the use of Persian in courts of law (see Preface to Vocabu- /ary). It was thus due to the efforts of Halhed and Forster, seconded among Europeans by Carey and the Srirampur missionaries and among Bengalis by Ram Mohan Ray and his friends, that Bengali not only became the official language of the Presidency but it now ranks as one of the most prolific literary languages of India. One of the greatest difficulty, however, under which all compilers in this period had to labour and to which Forster himself, as his preface shows, was fully alive, was the exceedingly corrupt state of the language inits current ‘dialect’ form. There was no standard literature, or if there had been one it was long forgotten or was not so widely known as to ensure fixity of forms and expressions.2. This corruption, 1 Printed at Caleutta from the Press of Ferris and Co., 1799. Dedicated to Thomas Graham Esqr., dated December 15, 1799. A copy of this work will be conveniently found in the Calcutta Imperial Library. Grammar shows, he was not aware of the existence of more than half a dozen old Bengali works. He takes his passages mostly from Mahabharat (from which he gives a lengthy quotation at pp. 37-42), Ramayan and the various works of Bharat-chandra, still in vogue, especially his Bidyasundar. Printing there was hardly any and books mostly in manus2ripts were not easily procurable. It is also notable that Halhed confines himself exclusively to examples taken from Poetry and there is not a single prose quotation in his works. “I might observe ” he writes, “ that Bengali is at present in the same state with Greece before the time of Thucydides when Poetry waz the
 * As the various quotations by way of illustration in Halhed’s