Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian reformer who was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha. In 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a social-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He was given the title of Raja by Akbar II, a Mughal emperor.
William Carey was an English Christian missionary, Particular Baptist minister, translator, social reformer and cultural anthropologist who founded the Serampore College and the Serampore University, the first degree-awarding university in India.
Christians in Bangladesh account for 0.30% of the nation's population as of 2022 census. Together with Judaism and Buddhism, they account for 1% of the population. Islam accounts for 91.04% of the country's religion, followed by Hinduism at 7.95% as per 2022 census.
Joshua Marshman was a Baptist missionary in Bengal, India from 1799 until his death. He was a member of the Serampore trio with William Carey and William Ward. The trio founded Serampore University, many primary and secondary schools, and translated and published a large number of works, including translations of the Bible. Marshman was "an accomplished scholar, linguist and theologian and was a prolific author and polemicist." His mission involved social reforms and intellectual debates with educated Hindus such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
Fort William College was an academy of oriental studies and a centre of learning, founded on 18 August 1800 by Lord Wellesley, then Governor-General of British India, located within the Fort William complex in Calcutta. Wellesley started the Fort William College to train the European administrators. He backdated the statute of foundation to 4 May 1800, to commemorate the first anniversary of his victory over Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam. Thousands of books were translated from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu into English at this institution.
William Ward (1769–1823) was an English pioneer Baptist missionary, author, printer and translator.
Ramram Basu was born in Chinsurah, Hooghly District in present-day West Bengal state of India. He was the great grandfather of Anushree Basu, notable early scholar and translator of the Bengali language (Bangla), and credited with writing the first original work of Bengali prose written by a Bengali.
The Asia Pacific Baptist Federation (APBF) is a federation of 65 Baptist associations and is one of six regional fellowships in the Baptist World Alliance. The headquarters is in Okinawa City, Japan.
William Yates was an English Baptist missionary and orientalist. He created a Bible translation into Bengali.
The Serampore Mission Press was a book and newspaper publisher that operated in Serampore, Danish India, from 1800 to 1837.
Rev. Joseph van Someran Taylor, known more commonly as J. V. S. Taylor, was a Scottish Christian missionary and writer of Gujarati language. He made the earliest attempt among westerners at writing a grammar of Gujarati, and also translated the Bible into Gujarati.
The first Marathi translation was made by Vaidyanath Sarma under the supervision of the Serampore missionaries and William Carey at Fort William College. However Carey's translation was found lacking, and was revised by two American missionaries, Gordon Hall and Samuel Newell in 1826, with a subsequent edition in 1830. Further, David Oliver Allen "superintended a translation of the Scriptures into the Mahratta language" while in charge of the Bombay printshop 1844−53.
The modern Hindi and Urdu standards are highly mutually intelligible in colloquial form, but use different scripts when written, and have lesser mutually intelligibility in literary forms. The history of Bible translations into Hindi and Urdu is closely linked, with the early translators of the Hindustani language simply producing the same version with different scripts: Devanagari and Nastaliq, as well as Roman.
Languages spoken in the Indian Subcontinent belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken by 75% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 20% of Indians. Other languages belong to the Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, and a few other minor language families and isolates. India has the world's second-highest number of languages (780), after Papua New Guinea (839). The first known translation of any Christian Scripture in an Indian language was done to Konkani in 1667 AD by Ignazio Arcamone, an Italian Jesuit.
The Bible has been translated into the Nepali language several times. Beginning in 1821 with the first New Testament translation, these were historically translated and published in India. More recently, translations like the Nepali New Revised Version in 1997 have been translated and published in Nepal. Other recent versions like the Trinitarian Bible Society edition continue to be made in India specifically in the dialect of Nepali spoken in India.
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.
Dobhashi or Dobhashi Bengali is a neologism used to refer to a historical register of the Bengali language which borrowed extensively, in all aspects, from Arabic and Persian. It became the most customary form for composing puthi poetry predominantly using the traditional Bengali alphabet. However, Dobhashi literature has also been produced in the Sylhet Nagri script, as well as in the modified Arabic scripts of Chittagong and Nadia. The standardisation of the modern Bengali language during the colonial period, eventually led to its decline.
Noakhailla (নোয়াখাইল্লা), Noakhali Bengali also known by the demonym Noakhalian, is a dialect of Bengali, spoken by an estimated 7 million people, primarily in the Greater Noakhali region of Bangladesh as well as southern parts of Tripura in India. Outside of these regions, there are substantial numbers of Noakhailla speakers in other parts of Bangladesh; as well as diaspora communities in the Middle East, Italy, Europe and the United States.
John Mack of Serampore was a Scottish missionary who worked in the Serampore Mission. He took an interest in education and served as a principal of the Serampore College where he taught science and produced the first chemistry textbook in Bengali.
Felix Carey was a Baptist missionary, the eldest son of William Carey. He was involved in running the printing press of the Serampore Mission that his father had helped establish in India and used his linguistic skills in translating several works into the Bengali language including an attempted encyclopaedia on science. He also took an interest in the Burmese languages, Sanskrit and Pali grammar.
