Prof Dr Md Mahmudul Hassan :
Bangla is now not only our language, it is, in fact, a language of the whole world. Now, every UN member country celebrates 21st February as International Mother Language Day to uphold the status of this language, since the UNESCO on 16th November, 1999 declared 21st February as International Mother Language Day.
Bangla is now the state language of Bangladesh. Apart from this, Bengali is one of the administrative languages in some provinces of India like; West Bengal, Tripura and Assam, so Bengali is a provincial language of India. Bengali is also an official language in Sierra Leone of Africa. Thus, the status of Bengali language is increasing to a unique height. According to statistics, it ranks fifth among the 6909 languages of the world. Because, according to the population report, the Bengali population in the world is now around 290 million.
The practice of Bengali language, literature and culture beyond the borders of Bangladesh has now increased tremendously in the international arena. It is being researched and practiced in hundreds of universities in 30 countries of 4 continents. Besides, starting from the translation of 33 volumes of Rabindranath Tagore’s works in Chinese, Lalon Shah’s songs and philosophy have been translated into English and Japanese. During the Soviet period, a large part of Rabindranath’s literary works were translated into Rush language. According to a study, the world’s interest in Bengali language is increasing day by day after English, Chinese and Japanese languages.
Besides Bangladesh and India, Bangla is mostly practiced in Britain, America and different other countries including China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Germany, Poland, Australia. There are separate channels in Bengali language in the state radio of 6 countries of the world. Different Bangla language programs are being broadcast on radios of more than 10 countries. There are 6 Bangladeshi-owned Bengali-language television channels in Britain and 10 in the United States. 12 Bengali weekly magazines are published in Britain. There is a Bangla radio station called ‘Betar Bangla’ too. There are 5 Bengali dailies in Italy and 3 radio stations in Rome and Venice. There are 6 online televisions and hundreds of Facebook televisions run in Europe. Besides, printed and online Bengali language magazines are published in 8 European countries including Denmark and Sweden and 6 countries in the Middle East.
Bengali language is being practiced in at least 10 universities and Asian research centers in the United States. These include New York, Chicago, Minnesota, Florida, Maryland, California, Virginia, Wisconsin and Harvard. Justin Alfonso Chacon is working on the role of psychology in expressing the meaning of Bengali language at the University of Maryland in the US. Maria Helen Bero worked on Nazrul Islam’s literature at New York University. A book on this subject has also been published. Apart from teaching Bangla in the United States, research is also being done on Rabindranath Tagore, Nazrul Islam, Jibanananda Das and Lalon Shah. The spread of Bangla in the United States was due to foreign Bengali researchers like; Clinton B. Sheley, Ralph Nicholas, Carol Solomon, Caroline Wright, Henry Glassy. Among them, Clinton B. Sheley’s research on Jibanananda Das and his poems has gained a great fame outside the academics. He has also worked with Mangalkavya and Michael Madhusudan Datta.
Joseph O’Connell from Canada and Barry Morrison from Vancouver are teaching and researching in Bengali. Rajendra Singh, a professor at the University of Montreal has research and publications on Bengali.
At the University of Heidelberg in Germany, along with Aloka Ranjan Dasgupta, an expatriate poet from West Bengal, Martin Kempson translated and researched Bengali literature. Hans Harder of the South Asia Department at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, has studied the Maizbhandar in Chittagong. He has been researching the oldest Bengali poetry Charyapad for a long time.
University of Poland Professor Elvieta Walter translates Rabindranath and Bibhutibhushan from Bengali into Polish. Father Datien, a Belgian citizen, has researched old books and manuscripts in Bengali. Based on those experiences, he has written basic literature in Bengali about Bengali society and culture. Most recently, the Bengal Study Center for the study of Bengali language is being opened at the University of Aalborg in Denmark.
In Asia, Bengali is practiced in Japan, China, Korea, Singapore and Malaysia. However, Japan and recently China are ahead in this regard. In Japan, about 70 years ago, Kazuo Azuma started learning Bengali from Rabindra-Anurag. A number of Bengali researchers are working there, including Kei Shiraya of the Japan Foundation and the University of Tokyo, Kyoko Niwa and the Udicha couple. The teaching of Bangla language started three years ago at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Japanese students are getting the opportunity to learn and practice Bangla language there. Kyoko Niwa, Kazuhiro Watanabe and ManjurulHaque are teaching there.
Hujiyara and Tomio Mizkami are currently teaching Bangla at Kyoto and Osaka Universities in Japan. Apart from Bengali, they are compiling dictionaries for the Chak language of Bangladesh. In addition, Hidiki Maki of Gifu University is doing comparative research on sentence structure in Bengali and Japanese.
Recently, the Bangla Department has been opened in Beijing University. Regular Bangla language and literature classes have been started there since 2018. Several translations of Bengali literature have already been published from China. In addition, 30 former employees of China Radio International are working on translating Rabindranath’s literature into Chinese.
Between 1894 and 1928, the British scholar George Abraham Grierson published a famous study called the Linguistic Survey of India in 20 volumes of eight thousand pages. In the nineteenth century, research on the Bengali language was started in colonial countries like Britain, France, Holland and Portugal. The practice of Bengali language was started by the colonial scholars and missionaries of these countries.
Readers from almost all countries of the world regularly read news from the online versions of famous Bengali newspapers in Bangladesh and India. In that sense, it can be assumed that Bengali speaking people live in almost all the countries of the globe. In addition, many established TV channels in Bangladesh are also quite popular in the international arena. Numerous channels including BTV, BTV World, NTV, ATN Bangla are broadcast in most of the countries of the world. Due to the Corona Pandemic, the practice of Bangla language has increased tremendously in almost all countries of the world using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram etc.
Therefore, it is clear from the above discussion that Bengali is now not only the language of Bangladesh, but also it is now an international language, which is further enhanced by the simultaneous celebration of all the UN member states on 21st February every year. We hope that the practice of Bengali language, literature and culture will increase day by day and become a more prosperous language in the whole world.
(Dr Mahmudul is Principal, Daffodil International School).
