The result was a growing popularity and eventual mythologisation of Persian tales among Bengali people-such as that of Laili and Majnu, Yusuf and Julekha, or the works of Ferdousi, Jami, and Nizami-and an absorption of Persian words into the Bengali language. Secondly, the Iranians flocking into India, many of them Shia Muslims, settled in the (present-day Bangladeshi) cities of Murshidabad, Dhaka, and Hugli among others, and took up positions as Ulamas, teachers, and poets in Bengal, much like the Arab sea-traders who had entered through the ports of Chittagong earlier in the 8th century. While the influence on the Delhi headquarters was particularly evident from the development of Urdu-a mixture of Hindi and Persian languages-its impact on Bengal stemmed from a number of sources over several centuries.įirstly, the Muslim kings of the 15th and 16th centuries are said to have been “active patrons of Bengali literature”, according to Chatterjee, while the practices of the Sultan’s court are also said to have pushed Bengali chiefs into mastering Persian as part of their job. The year 1206 saw the migration of many Persian and Central Asian poets to India, resulting in the assimilation of Persian literary trends into the Indian cultural landscape.
The Persian influence on Bengali dates back to the 13th century Turkish invasion of India. Among the oldest references to Bengali include the ancient Brahmi script found in Ashokan rock edicts, the Bengali commercial and industrial works from the Kusana period mentioned in the Greek Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century AD), Bengali place names found in inscriptions of old books from the first half of the 5th century AD, and a glossary of 300 words in a ‘scattered’ Sanskrit commentary on the Amara-kosa by Bengali Pandit Vandhya Ghatiya Sarvananda from around 1159 AD. Having previously settled in Eastern Iran, Aryan speakers supposedly came to India around 1500 BC, when the first Vedic hymns are said to have been produced. But a glimpse into the history of these linguistic concoctions reveals just how porous and pulsating language can be, and how rich Bengali as become over the centuries as a result of travelling cultures.Īs Suniti Kumar Chatterjee explains in The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language(1926), Bengali predates the age of the province of Bengal in pre-partition India, originally a part of the Eastern Indo-Iranian or Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Derived from Persian and Arabic origins, these words, expressions, and practices, among countless others, have become so deeply ingrained in Bengali that we seldom spare thought to their foreign lineage. Think of the standardised farewell greeting of Khoda Hafez even among some non-Muslims in social situations, and the knowledge of most Muslim Bengalis of the Arabic script, even if they do not understand the language. The word for ‘pen’-kolom the word for ‘sky’-asmaan ‘river’-doria ‘land’-jomeen. Think of some of the words we use most often in our daily lives in Bengali. Sarah Anjum Bari wrote for the Daily Star back in 2019 about a subject that interests me on a number of levels: