Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/125

 ৪৪৪, CAREY AND SRIRAMPUR MISSION 101 Indeed, a foreigner always finds it hard work to obtain in a year the endless variety of its idiom and the niceties of pronunciation: but Carey certainly was very far from right when he says further that although the language is rich, beautiful, and expressive, it has got scarcely a large vocabulary in use about religion and kindred subjects. ! The whole trend of ancient or pre-British Bengali litera- ture which is religious in subject will prove the inappro- priateness of this hasty statement. The half-pitying and half-contemptuous tone in which Carey and his mission- ary colleagues speak of our forefathers as so many ‘hea- thens’, or semi-barbarians? no doubt raises our smile today, but they in all sincerity, born of religious enthu- siasm, really thought in this way. It is true indeed that there was a partial decadence of religious life and ideals in the country during the last years of the Mohammedan rule, yet Carey and his colleagues in spite of their eatholi- city and tolerance, could never detect the signs of religious life which could produce the noblest songs of Ram-prasad. From the earliest times to the days of Raim-mohan Ray and even to the present day, religion had, as we have already stated, a great influence on Bengali literature. The great personality of Chaitanya and his disciples, the songs of the Baisnab poets, breathing as they do the purest language of poetry and devotion—all indicate what charm religion had always possessed for the people and their literature. The fact was, making every possible allowance to missionary fanati- cism, that Carey, as he himself admits*, could lay his hand upon very few ancient Bengali books and manuscripts; % See his letter to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, quoted in E, Carey, op. cit. p. 239. ? He speaks of this country as one “devoted to the service of Satan and immersed in the awful ignorance of heathenness.’ E. Carey, op. cit. p. 294,
 * Smith, op. cit. p, 202.