Assamese or Asamiya is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, where it is an official language. It serves as a lingua franca of the wider region and has over 15 million native speakers according to Ethnologue.
Meer Syed Mosharraf Hossain was a Bengali writer, novelist, playwright and essayist. He is considered to be the first major writer to emerge from the Muslim society of Bengal, and one of the finest prose writers in the Bengali language. His magnum opus Bishad Sindhu is a popular classic among the Bengali readership.
Ishwar Chandra Bandyopadhyay popularly known as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, was an Indian educator and social reformer of the nineteenth century. His efforts to simplify and modernise Bengali prose were significant. He also rationalised and simplified the Bengali alphabet and type, which had remained unchanged since Charles Wilkins and Panchanan Karmakar had cut the first (wooden) Bengali type in 1780.
Sylheti Nagri or Sylheti Nāgarī, known in classical manuscripts as Sylhet Nagri as well as by many other names, is an Indic script of the Brahmic family. The script was historically used in areas of Bengal and Assam that were east of the Padma, primarily in the eastern part of the Sylhet region, to document Muslim religious poetry known as puthis; having no presence in formal documentations. In the course of the 20th century, it has lost much ground to the standardised Eastern Nagari script. Printing presses for Sylheti Nagri existed as late as into the 1970s, and in the 2000s, a Unicode font was created for the script.
Sukumar Sen was an Indian linguist and historian of the Bengali literature, who was also well versed in Pāli, Prakrit and Sanskrit.
The Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi is the official regulatory body of the Bengali language in West Bengal, India. It was founded on 20 May 1986 in Kolkata to act as the official authority of the language and is entrusted with the responsibility of reforming Bengali spelling and grammar, compiling dictionaries, encyclopedias and terminologies and promoting Bengali language and culture in West Bengal. Though the Akademi has no enforcement power over their rules and regulations, they are widely accepted by the Governments of West Bengal and Tripura as well as a considerable number of private publishing houses and institutions such as the Oxford University Press and the Ramakrishna Mission.
Mallika Sengupta was a Bengali poet, feminist, and reader of Sociology from Kolkata, known for her "unapologetically political poetry".
Romanisation of Bengali is the representation of written Bengali language in the Latin script. Various romanisation systems for Bengali are used, most of which do not perfectly represent Bengali pronunciation. While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, none has been adopted with the same degree of uniformity as Japanese or Sanskrit.
Yashodhara Ray Chaudhuri is a poet residing in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. She produced collections of Bengali poetry. She was awarded the Krittibas Puraskar in 1998 by the Krittibas Patrika.
The Sanskrit Press and Depository was set up in 1807 by Baburam, who was a teacher at Hariram College, one of the primitive colleges in east Bengal. Later, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Madan Mohan Tarkalankar with a loan of 600 rupees updated it with better machinery and work-environment.
Bengali, also known by its endonym Bangla, is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. With approximately 240 million native speakers and another 41 million as second language speakers as of 2021, Bengali is the sixth most spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world. It is the fifth most spoken Indo-European language.
The Bengali script or Bangla alphabet is the alphabet used to write the Bengali language based on the Bengali-Assamese script, and has historically been used to write Sanskrit within Bengal. It is one of the most widely adopted writing systems in the world . It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. It is used as the official script of the Bengali language in Bangladesh, West Bengal, Tripura and Barak valley of Assam as well as the Meitei language in Manipur, two of the official languages of India.
Ghulam Murshid is a Bangladeshi author, scholar and journalist, based in London. He won a number of awards, including Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1982 for his contribution to research.; Prothom Alo Book Award in 2007; IFIC literary prize 2018; the Ekusey Padak for language and literature in 2021 and the Vidyasagar Endowments Lectures 1973 at Calcutta University. Besides being a prolific author, Dr. Murshid is a distinguished lexicographer. He edited a three-volume Bengali dictionary, called 'Bibartonmulak Bangla Abhidhan', published in 2013–2014, by the Bangla Academy. In the two hundred years' of history of Bengali dictionaries, it is the first to be based on historical principles. It provides the evolution of the form and meaning of every word and traces the first use thereof in written Bengali.
Anupam Roy is an Indian singer-songwriter, music director, composer, songwriter, guitarist, playback singer from Kolkata, India. He made his debut with Amake Amar Moto Thakte Dao & Benche Thakar Gaan, which appeared on the soundtrack of the 2010 Bengali film Autograph. Since then, he has gone on to compose, write lyrics and sing for many Bengali films.
Panchanan Karmakar (Mallick) (died c. 1804) was an Indian Bengali inventor, born at Tribeni, Hooghly, Bengal Presidency, British India, hailed from Serampore. He assisted Charles Wilkins in creating the first the Bangla type. His wooden Bengali alphabet and typeface had been used until Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar proposed a simplified version. Apart from Bangla, Karmakar developed type in 14 languages, including Arabic, Persian, Marathi, Telugu, Burmese and Chinese.
Mashrur Arefin is a Bangladeshi writer, novelist, poet, translator and banker. He is known for his Bengali translation of Homer’s Iliad and Franz Kafka's stories, and his novels, August Abchchaya and Althusser (2020). He received the BRAC Bank-Samakal Literature Award for his translation of Franz Kafka's stories in 2013, he won the Gemcon Shahitya Puroshkar 2020 for his first novel August Abchhaya. and he received IFIC Bank Literary Award 2019 for the novel August Abchaya.
Ajit Kumar Dutta, known as Ajit Dutta, was a prominent Bengali poet, writer, essayist and professor.
Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay(3rd June,1920 – 21 March, 2003) was historian of Bengali literature, professor, researcher and former president of Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi. He got famous due to his book Bangla Sahityer Itibritta which is published in nine volumes.
Madanmohan Tarkalankar is one of the Sanskrit scholars of the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century who has made a special contribution to the development of written Bengali language. He is also considered as one of the pioneers of the Bengali renaissance. He was a professor at Fort William College and authored several textbooks on early childhood education.
Oindrilla Maity Surai is an Indian independent curator, art critic, and pedagogue based in Kolkata. She has curated exhibitions beyond the paradigms of the commercial gallery. Her major contributions lie in her converting the exhibition spaces as sites of resistances in the post-Covid 19 era, following the country's political conditions and experimenting with the anatomy of what may be termed as the biennale mode of exhibition making in the city's public sphere. She has also participated in several community- based art projects as an artist.
