Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/184

 160 BENGALI LITERATURE in 1801 but also the friendship of Raja Ra@m-mohan Ray, himself a learned man, who is said by Carey to have exercised great influence on Ram নান of Ram Basu’s life and character and mould- ed his literary aspirations. It should be noted here that Ram-mohan, according to some, was the author of the first original prose treatise in Bengali ; because his Bengali work on Monotheism ( হিন্দগণের পৌভ্তলিকতার প্রতিবাদ) was, according to himself, written when he was only sixteen, and supposing him to be born in 1774, or even, according to others, as late as 1780, the book must have been written before any of the publications of the Fort William College or of the Srirampur_ Press issued. But this book meant for private circulation was never printed or published, and Ram-mohan’s earliest publication in Bengali was in 1815. It seems therefore that Ram Basu’s Ram _ Basu’s posi- tion as the earliest original writer of writer in modern Bengali prose still, Bengali prose. position as the first native original after all, remains unassailable. But the influence of Ram-mohan’s unpublished work, which Ram Basu is said to have taken as his model, can never be disputed ; and it was from the learned Raja that Ram Basu got the first impulse to write in Bengali. Carey reports to have heard that Ram Ram took the manuscripts of his first work, Pratapaditya Charitra to Ram-mohan, and got it thoroughly revised by him 1. 1 Ram Basu’s Attack on Brahmins (called simply on Brahmins in Murdoch, Catalogue) as well as his other writings show that he shared many of his views with his friend and master, Ram- mohan. In Bangali Samayik Sahitya (1917), vol. 1. p. 25, this work of Ram Basu on Brahmins is called Bit4{F¥F and the date given is 1801. Speaking of this work, Marshman op. cit. says that in it “he exposed the absurdities of Hinduism and the pretension of its priest-hood with great severity” and pays him the compliment of