Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/81

 INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECE 57 induced them to the study and encouragement of the vernacular. Time was coming when Bengali should, both officially as well as popularly, be the recognised vernacular ; and both Halhed and Forster, the two earliest important European writers in Bengali, rightly insist at some length upon the absurdity and inconvenience of continuing Persian as the language of the Court Its political and mela and the market-place and advocate utilitarian ground, more wide-spread and general use of Bengali in its place. Exigencies of administration which had made it almost obligatory for the governors to learn the language of the governed hastened this movement towards the neglected vernacular. The missionaries, on the other hand, found out early that if they were to reach the people directly they must first learn their language and gain a thorough knowledge of their modes of thinking and feel- ling. Systematic mission-work always presupposed a thorough training in their language. All these and other reasons first impelled the early European settlers to take to a systematic study of the neglected vernacular. When therefore with the disappearance of the old Bengali writers, Bengali literature had been sent adrift to shift for itself as best as it could, it was taken up and _ fostered by strangers hailing from distant lands whom fortunately political, personal, or utilitarian reasons, if not always the love of the language or the literature itself, first urged to its elaborate study under entirely new conditions. This brief and necessarily incomplete picture of the general state of this country from 1760 to 1800 will, to some extent, exhibit the new Concluding remarks eonditions under which modern on the significance of i. & ও the general history of Bengali literature first came _ into ee eres faa of ‘tory. being. The instability and pertur- history. bation, consequent upon these political