Page:The history of the Bengali language (1920).pdf/261

Rh foreign to the Aryan speech. That the script of modern Bengal, which can be proved to have taken its modern shape and form on the soil of Bengal at a comparatively recent time, is current in Assam, should not also be forgotten. There are instances, how many scholars by forgetting this fact have pronounced very wrongly the language of some old books to be Assamese, on the ground that the language discloses many forms which are now current in Assamese.

How after the complete disintegration of the old Kaliṅga Empire, a province bearing the  name Orissa was constituted, and how a new Aryan speech, now called Oriya, came into being, cannot be detailed here. It will suffice to say, that when Huen Tsiang visited the land in the 7th century A.D., the people of Kaliṅga with their Dravidian speech were found confined within the confines of the Andhra country, and Orissa was struggling into a new life, with new ethnic elements and a new speech; the Utkala people, in the north were not aryanized at that time, and the people in the District of Puri (Kongada) were only learning Northern Indian speech and script under the influence of the successors of Raja Narendra Gupta of Karṇa Suvarṇa in Bengal. We learn also from some old works on Dramaturgy that the Oḍras and their congeners the Śabaras, used only some Aryan words in their non-Aryan speeches in the 6th century A.D., and their speeches were then called বিভাষা on that account. How because of the supremacy of the Kośala Guptas for about three centuries, a Māgadhi speech took deep root in Orissa, has been narrated briefly in the 4th lecture. The Northern boundary-line of Orissa runs from the North-East corner of the District of Balasore to the North-West corner of the Feudatory State of Gangpur, along the Southern limits of Bengali-speaking and Hindi-speaking