Sir Charles Wilkins was an English typographer and Orientalist, and founding member of The Asiatic Society. He is notable as the first translator of Bhagavad Gita into English. He is also the first person to introduce the term Hinduism which would refer to all the different mythologies and cultures of which were existing in India as one. He supervised Panchanan Karmakar to create one of the first Bengali typefaces. In 1788, Wilkins was elected a member of the Royal Society.
The music of West Bengal includes multiple indigenous musical genres such as Baul, Ramprasadi, Bishnupuri Classical, Kirtan, Shyama Sangeet, Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrul Geeti, Dwijendrageeti, Prabhat Samgiita, Agamani-Vijaya, Patua Sangeet, Gambhira, Bhatiali, Bhawaiya, Bengali Rock.
Banglapedia:theNational Encyclopedia of Bangladesh is the first Bangladeshi encyclopedia. It is available in print, CD-ROM format and online, in both Bengali and English. The print version comprises fourteen 500-page volumes. The first edition was published in January 2003 in ten volumes by the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, with a plan to update it every two years. The second edition was issued in 2012 in fourteen volumes.
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.
Hooghly district is one of the districts of the Indian state of West Bengal. It can alternatively be spelt Hoogli or Hugli. The district is named after the Hooghly River.
Bengali literature denotes the body of writings in the Bengali language and which covers Old Bengali, Middle- Bengali and Modern Bengali with the changes through the passage of time and dynastic patronization or non-patronization. Bengali has developed over the course of roughly 1,300 years. If the emergence of the Bengali literature supposes to date back to roughly 650 AD, the development of Bengali literature claims to be 1600 years old. The earliest extant work in Bengali literature is the Charyapada, a collection of Buddhist mystic songs in Old Bengali dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries. The timeline of Bengali literature is divided into three periods: ancient (650–1200), medieval (1200–1800) and modern. Medieval Bengali literature consists of various poetic genres, including Hindu religious scriptures, Islamic epics, Vaishnava texts, translations of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit texts, and secular texts by Muslim poets. Novels were introduced in the mid-19th century. Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore is the best known figure of Bengali literature to the world. Kazi Nazrul Islam, notable for his activism and anti-British literature, was described as the Rebel Poet and is now recognised as the National poet of Bangladesh.
Rarh region is a toponym for an area in the Indian subcontinent that lies between the Chota Nagpur Plateau on the West and the Ganges Delta on the East. Although the boundaries of the region have been defined differently according to various sources throughout history, it is mainly coextensive with the state of West Bengal, also comprising parts of the state of Jharkhand in India. Linguistically, the region is defined with population speaking the Rarhi Bengali local Bengali dialect.
Ishwar Chandra Gupta was a famous Indian Bengali poet and writer. Gupta was born in Kanchrapara, in Bengal.
Peary Chand Mitra was an Indian writer, journalist, cultural activist and entrepreneur. His pseudonym was Tek Chand Thakur. He was a member of Henry Derozio's Young Bengal group, who played a leading role in the Bengal renaissance with the introduction of simple Bengali prose. His Alaler Gharer Dulal pioneered the novel in the Bengali language, leading to a tradition taken up by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and others. Mitra died on 23 November 1883 in Kolkata.
Pandua is a census town in the Pandua CD block in the Chinsurah subdivision of the Hooghly district in the Indian state of West Bengal.
The culture of Bengal defines the cultural heritage of the Bengali people native to eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent, mainly what is today Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura, where they form the dominant ethnolinguistic group and the Bengali language is the official and primary language. Bengal has a recorded history of 1,400 years.
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 Serampore Mission Press was a book and newspaper publisher that operated in Serampore, Danish India, from 1800 to 1837.
In the last quarter of the 18th century, Calcutta grew into the first major centre of commercial and government printing. For the first time in the context of South Asia it becomes possible to talk of a nascent book trade which was full-fledged and included the operations of printers, binders, subscription publishing and libraries.
Karmakar is a Bengali Hindu caste spread throughout West Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh. The Karmakars are traditionally blacksmiths by trade.They are one of the fourteen castes belonging to 'Nabasakh' group. They are recognized as Other Backward Class and also Forward Caste (General) by the Government of West Bengal.
Jirat is a census town located in Hooghly District in the Indian State of West Bengal. It is the administrative headquarter of Balagarh Block. It is birthplace of the Dr. Gangaprasad Mukherjee, Writer Charuchandra Banerjee, Tollywood actor Anil Chatterjee, sonnet writer Debendranath Senthe and poet Mohitlal Majumdar etc.
Sanjib Chandra Chattopadhyay was a Bengali writer, poet and journalist. He was the elder brother of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.
The Sylheti or Sylhetis are an Indo-Aryan ethnocultural group that are associated with the Sylhet region. There are strong diasporic communities in Barak Valley of Assam, India, North Tripura, as well as in rest of Bangladesh and northeast India. They speak Sylheti, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language that is considered "a distinct language by many and a dialect of Bengali by some others".
A Grammar of the Bengal Languages is a 1778 modern Bengali grammar book written in English by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. This is the first grammar book of the Bengali language. The book, published in 1778, was probably printed from the Endorse Press in Hooghly, Bengal Presidency.
Dobhashi 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.
