When William
Radice, in 1972, went to learn Bangla at SOAS, Tarapada Mukherjee, teacher of
Bangla at the department of the languages and cultures of South Asia, on his
arrival at the school after holidays spent in India, jokingly asked Radice why
he was interested in learning Bangla when there were plenty of people in the
world who could speak Bangla well.
Radice said
he wanted to translate the Bangla literature into English. And he translated a
number of pieces of the Bangla literature – Rabindranath Tagore, Michael
Madhusudan Dutt and Sakuntala – into English. Being a poet himself, he wrote
the libretto for a chamber opera, snatched by the Gods, based on Tagore’s
‘Debatar Gras’.
But the most
notable of his achievements is his effort in continuing the study of Bangla and
its literature at London University, especially after the death of Tarapada
Mukherjee in 1990. After the death of Tarapada, who held a chair for Bangla,
SOAS planned to get rid of Bangla teaching and the professorship was
discontinued. Bangla now continues to be taught with a lectureship. Given to
William Radice.
Both Oxford
and Cambridge got rid of chairs for Bangla long ago. The only Oxford PhD in the
Bangla literature in about decades is William Radice, who did his doctor of
philosophy on Michael Madhusudan Dutt in 1987 under historian Tapan
Raichaudhuri in the South Asisan studies department. Now the School of Oriental
and African Studies in the only institution in England with a chair for Bangla.
‘I struggled
for 14 years for Bangla at London University and now I have an assistant. I am
hopeful of its studies in Europe. I have now six research students taking courses in Bangla at SOAS,’ he said, sitting
in the lounge of a hotel at Baridhara towards the end of the first week of
March, in his fluent Bangla with less aspiration that what is required for the
initial sound of the word, cbbatra, for ‘students,’ with a tinge of English
intonation. The students are from countries such as Portugal, Slovenia or even
India.
Chittagong
University Bangla professor Moniruzzaman, a friend of Radice’s who failed to attend the lecture
Radice gave at the Bangla Academy the day before, sitting by, shook his head
and explained Radice’s struggle for the study of Bangla at SOAS.
Radice has
now Hanne-Ruth Thompson, known as Hanna Thompson, as his assistant teaching at
SOAS. She had a book, Essential Everyday Bengali, published by the Bangla Academy
in Dhaka in 1999.
On a hopeful
note, he said SOAS evening classes for Bangla have 40 students. Who are not
required to pass any examinations. But they attend the classes only to learn
how to speak, read and write Bangla. Unlike the research students, the evening
class people have different reasons to learn the language. Abu Musa Mohammad
Arif Billah, a teacher of Persian at Dhaka University, now doing his PhD at
SOAS on the influence of the Persian literature on Shah Muhammad Sagir and
Alaol, two mediaeval Bangla poets and teaching Bangla in the evening classes,
said many of the English speakers came to learn Bangla as they are in love with
or have planned to get married to Bangla speakers. Arif, sitting at the table,
said some of the students learn Bangla as they wanted to work with borough
councils working with Bangla-speakers; some of them work with aid groups and
some of them are general practitioners.
SOAS will be
offering course in Bangla, along with other languages, in its new School of
Languages, ‘of the wider world, not just French or German, but also the African
languages or Bangla from the next year,’ Radice said, expecting the number of
students for Bangla to keep growing. Arif Billah said it would just be like the
Institute of Modern Languages at Dhaka University. Radice said he would try to take classes in
the evening so that a large number of working people could take the courses.
Radice thinks
a growing number of participants in the Bengal studies programme of the
European Conference on Modern South Asisan Studies from 14 in the past session
to 27 this time is a pointer to an increased interest in the Bangla Language
and literature outside South Asia. But even then, he said, he could count on
one hand the chairs for Bangla in the educational institutions in Europe. But
Bangla is taught at many universities having no chair. ‘There is a chair for
Bangla in the whole of France, at the Institute National des Langues et
Civilisations Orientales (the national institute of oriental languages and
cultures),’ Radice counted on the fingers. There are two women in Czech
Republic teaching Bangla. He said Prague is a linguistic stronghold for Bangla,
‘probably because of folk songs,’ as explained Moniruzzaman.
‘In the whole
of America, there is only one chair, at Chicago University, given to Clinton B
Seely. There were two chairs, but one was closed after the death of Edward
Dimok. Farida Majid teaches at Columbia University; but there is no chair for
Bangla as such.’
In Germany,
there is Hans Harder who teaches at Halle; there was Alokranjan Das Gupta at
the oriental studies department at the University of Heidelberg; now the wife
of Deutsche Welle’s Bangla section chief teaches Bangla, but there is no chair
for the language.
The
universities across the world, Radice said, expanded their areas of interest
and many universities opened departments and chairs for Hindi and Urdu, two
dominant languages of South Asia of the time. Bangla was no state language at
the time and when now Bangla has attained the status of a state language and
people around the world are interested in learning it, the universities
worldwide have been facing resource constraints.
Radice talked
with the Bangla Academy, the cultural affairs ministry and few other organizations
during the tenure of the first caretaker government in 1991 to fund or
subsidise chair in London; but the matter could not get rolling because of the
unwillingness of the agencies he talked with. He said he did not expect the
government to subsidise chair for Bangla in London or in other places as the
Bangladesh government had other priorities. But he said the government would
need to do this if it wanted the keep the studies of the language and
literature going among the speakers of other languages.
Students in
England can take courses in Bangla in GCSE, O-Levels and A-Levels. There are
people in the educational institutions who can set the questions; but there is
no moderator who can evaluate the standards. Radice thought there should be someone
at the top for such jobs. And for this there should be chairs for Bangla in the
countries where educational institutions offer courses in Bangla.
The teaching
of Bangla at SOAS has not faltered for lack of study materials. Radice has his
book, Teach Yourself Bengali, published by Hodder Headline in London in 1994,
which the teachers follow in Bangla classes. Arif Billah said all the people
like him supplement the method of Radice in teaching.
Hanna
Thompson, who ‘speaks Bangla more in the style of Bangladeshis’ unlike Radice
who thinks his speech resembles more the West Bengal style, has been working
towards a definitive grammar of the Bangla language based on a practical study.
The SOAS web page says she has moved away from the high form of Bangla, sadhu
bhasha, and included examples from the modern spoken form. And more
importantly, her work will include the area of compound verbs which Radice said
have not been adequately dealt with in any existing grammars or dictionaries.
In an article in the February 2 issue of Desh, published from Kolkata, Thompson
said no knowledge of Sanskrit might be her strength in writing a grammar of the
language as she might look at it from a neutral standpoint.
But there is
dearth of dictionaries, especially English-Bangla, for learners who speak other
languages. Any foreigner willing to write Bangla needs a good English-Bangla
dictionary. But most dictionaries, published from Bangladesh and West Bengal,
give only definitions of entries, rather than giving specific synonyms of the
word. Radice said English-Bangla dictionaries define, for an example, the word
‘horse’ as ‘a quadruped animal,’ which might be enough for one to understand
the word, but all such people need is the Bangla word for ‘horse,’ ‘ghora,’ or
‘ashwa’ or something else.
Much earlier,
the Oxford University Press in Britain wanted to bring out a concise dictionary
in its much routed format, in two sections – Bangla-English and English-Bangla.
There had been some communications between the Oxford University Press and the
Bangla Academy. But initiatives fell through as the Oxford University Press in
India said it would bring out such a dictionary and it was not willing to work
with the Bangla Academy. Many years passed by and, unfortunately, the Indian
dictionary did not come out. Radice said back in London, he would ask if the
press was still willing and he would ask the academy if it was ready for such a
job.