Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/77

 INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT 53 seldom read five words together, without stopping to make out the syllables, and often scarcely two, even when the writing is legible. The case is precisely the same with the knowledge of j/igures.” These observations, however, coming, as they do perhaps, from a missionary, whose personal knowledge of the country and its inhabitants might not perhaps have extended beyond narrow limits, must be taken subject to this reservation that although this might be the picture of the general state of knowledge and culture at this time, yet there still lived in dignified isolation a few learned pundits in the remote villages and that the days of Sanserit learning were not quite over. But even these Brahmans, with a few exceptions, were now, as we have stated, a fallen race; and the exclusive genius of Brahmanism in its lowest phase not only barred the masses from the temple of kuowledge but also made themselves neglect the vernacular as “ Prakrit” dialect fit only for “demons and women.” So far indeed had they carried their contempt for their mother-tongue that while they cultivated the learned language with assiduity, they, in many instances, prided themselves on writing the language of the people with inaccuracy and sometimes in an almost unintelligible semi-barbarie sanscritised style. We shall see some specimens of the latter kind even in the writings of the more accomplished Pundits of the Fort William College. It is natural to expect that these so-called pundits should strenuously discourage the use of the vernacular among the people and set their face against its improvement. The neglect of the vernaculars, especially Bengali, had reached such a stage that when Dr. Carey began to lecture at Fort William College, he could hardly muster a class; and the same learned doctor when he visited Nadiya, not many years ago the illustrious centre of Bengali language and literature, ‘he could not discover