Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/299

 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 275 plied the College with scholars and professors of Bengali. In this respect, each supplemented the work of the other. Indeed before the missionaries came in contact with the College of Fort William through the appointment of Carey as Professor of Bengali, their work in the field of Bengali prose had been very slight. In the meantime they had only succeeded in translating and printing off the Bengali Bible but in this again they had rendered only a doubtful service to Bengali prose. The Mission was too poor and too insignificant to undertake extensive literary work of a permanent kind ; and on ‘political and other grounds the missionaries had all along been held in disfayour. The first political recognition of the Mission and its worthy object with reference to the study of Bengali came with the appoint- ian pe ment of Dr. Carey as Professor in Lord Wellesley’s newly established College. Under the patronage, pecuniary and otherwise, of the College, a fresh impetus was given to the study of Bengali. But even then the stringent regulations which had fettered the press in India and _ other political restrictions stood in the way of intellectual progress and it was not until another decade or so had passed that a more liberal and far-sighted policy was adopted. It may also be noted here that the benefit rendered to Bengali by all these early institutions was never direct but came indirectly and therefore with occasional fluctuations through their encouragement of the study of the language itself on political and other utilitarian grounds. This European patronage, however, was attended with both loss and gain to Bengali Litera- oe patronage; ture. It is dangerous to dogmatise about influences but it cannot be denied that, speaking generally, it was the intellectual