Bengali, Assamese and Oriya literature

The growth of the Bhakti movement and the compositon of various hymns associated with Chaitanya provided a stimulus to the development and growth of Bengali. Narrative poems called the Mangal Kavyas also grew popular during this period. They propagated the worship of local deities like Chandi and transformed Puranic Gods like Siva and Vishnu into household deities.

After Hindi, the next significant literature was the one that developed in Bengal. The Baptist Mission Press was established in Serampore near Calcutta in 1800. East India Company founded the Fort William College in the same year. It provided training to civil servants of the Company in law, customs, religions, languages and literatures of India to enable them to work more efficiently.

In this regard, a very important landmark was achieved by William Carey, who wrote a grammar of Bengali and published an English-Bengali dictionary and also wrote books on dialogues and stories. It may be noted that the grammar and dictionaries are important in the development of a literature.

They guide the writers as to the correctness of a sentence and also help them in finding suitable words for a particular situation and idea. Although the aim of the press run by the missionaries was mainly to propagate Christian faith but other presses run by local people helped in the flourishing of non-Christian literature. Scores of pamphlets, small and big books and journals were produced.

In the meantime education spread, although at a very slow pace. But after 1835, when Macaulay won the battle against Orientalists, it spread at a faster pace. In 1854 came Sir Charles Wood’s Despatch and in 1857 the three universities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay were established. Besides textbooks for schools and colleges, other literature were also produced.

However it was Raja Ram Mohan Roy who wrote in Bengali besides English that gave impetus to Bengali literature. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-91) and Akshay Kumar Dutta (1820- 86) were two other writers of this early period. In addition to these, Bankim Chandra Chatterji (l834-94), Sharat Chandra Chatterji (l876-1938), and R.C. Dutta, a noted historian and a prose writer, all contributed to the making of Bengali literature.

But the most important name that influenced the whole of India was that of Rabindra Nath Tagore (1861-1941). Novels, dramas, short stories, criticism, music and essays, all flowed from his pen. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for his Geetanjali. However, a few things need to be noted about the influence of Western ideas which permeated Bengal and later on other parts of India. Upto 1800, most of the literature produced was limited to religion or courtly literature.

The Western influence brought the writers closer to the man in the street. The subjects were mundane. Some religious literature was also produced but it hardly said anything new. The final years of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century saw a new subject, nationalism, being taken up.

Two things were seen in this new trend. The first was the love for old history and culture and an awareness of the facts of British exploitation. The second was a clarion call for arousing the Indians to drive out the foreigners, both by persuasion and force. This new trend was expressed by Subrahmanyam Bharti in Tamil and Qazi Nazrul Islam in Bengali. The contributions of these two writers in arousing the nationalistic sentiments in the readers was tremendous. Their poetry was translated into other Indian languages.

Assamese - Like Bengali, Assamese also developed in response to the Bhakti movement. Shankardeva who introduced Vaishnavism in Assam helped in the growth of Assamese poetry. Even the Puranas were translated in Assamese. The earliest Assamese literature consisted of buranjis (court chronicles). Shankardev has left several devotional poems, which people song with rapturous pleasure, but it was only after 1827 that more interest was shown in producing Assamese literature.

Two names, Lakshmi Nath Bezbarua and Padmanaba Gohain Barua cannot be forgotten. From Orissa, a couple of names are worth mentioning and these are Fakirmohan Senapati and Radha Nath Ray, whose writings deserve considerable attention in the history of Oriya literature.

The works of Upendra Bhanja (1670 - 1720) were important as they ushered a new period of Oriya literature. In Orissa the works of Saraladasa are regarded as the first works of Oriya literature.