The unlikely Master-Mashai

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.