Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/76

 52 BENGALI LITERATURE Raj-narayan Basu’s delightful little sketch of that time. Sometimes, to eke out this half-diction, gesture-language was used, somewhat in the manner in which Gulliver spoke to the Lilliputians. The state of Bengali education, if not in a worse, was at least in no better plight. The en Bengali edu- mass of Bengali manuscripts recently unearthed by patient investigations of modern scholars was mostly unknown, and the literature of the time, possessing hardly any printed books, consisted chiefly of a handful of works, Manasa, Dharmamangal, Mahabharat of Kasidaés, Ramayan of Krttibas, Chandi of Kabi-kankan, Annadamangal of Bharat-chandra, and probably the songs of Ram-prasad. The only works which were read in the Path-salas, we learn on the authority of the biographer of Ram-kamal Sen', were Gurudaksina and the rules of arithmetic by Subhankar. There were neither good schools nor were there proper elementary text- books for purposes of instruction ; and even a decade later, this was one of the initial difficulties which the School Society felt in carrying out its worthy object of Bengali education. Such was the state of Bengali learning at this time that we learn from a writer in the Frrend of India? “Tf they can wrefe at all, each character, to say nothing of orthography, is made in so irregular and indistinct a man- ner, that comparatively few of them could read what is written by another : and some of them can scarcely wade through that has been written by themselves, after any lapse of time. If they have learnt to read, they can ’ Pearychand Mitra, Life of Ramkomul Sen (1880), p. 7. 2 vol. ii, p.892, quoted in Cal. Rev, vol. xiii, 1850. p. 182. See also Quarterly Friend of India, vol. iv. p. 152. This remark is confirmed by what Forster says in the Introduction to his Vocabulary with regard to the uncertainty of Bengali spelling and Bengali script.