A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c4.337

Language: English

v1.c4.337.1

Turning next to the eastern languages, Bengali and Oriya, there exists in the present day an active controversy between the literary heads of the two provinces. The Bengalis assert that Oriya is merely a dialect of Bengali, and has no claim to be considered an independent language, and they mix up with this assertion a second to the effect that if it is not it ought to be, mainly because they wish it was, and secondarily because the population of Orissa is so small as compared with that of Bengal that they think it useless to keep up a separate language and written character for so small a province. They further urge that the maintenance of a separate language prevents the Oriyas from learning Bengali and profiting by the vast stores of valuable literature which they consider the latter to contain. Much of this chain of arguments is purely political, and may therefore be very briefly dismissed by the following remarks. If Oriya is to be suppressed because it is only spoken by a few millions of people, it might also be urged that Dutch, or Danish, or Portuguese, should be obliterated also. Basque should also be stamped out, and the same argument would apply to Romaic or Modern Greek, and would justify the Russians in trying to eradicate Polish or the Austrians in annihilating Czech.

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But when the case of Oriya comes to be considered, it must be remembered that it is spoken not only by five millions in the settled and civilized districts of the sea-coast, but by an uncounted and widely dispersed mass of wild tribes in the vast tract of mountains which covers hundreds of miles inland, and extends as far west as Nagpore and as far south as Telingana. In these regions it is rapidly supplanting the old non-Aryan dialects; and from its having absorbed into itself much of the non-Aryan element, it affords a far better medium of civilization than Bengali. Moreover, it is far beyond the power of the handful of English and Bengalis settled in Orissa to stamp out the mother-tongue of all these millions, and it may be added that any forcible measures of repression would be entirely foreign and repugnant to the spirit of our policy. The result of teaching Bengali in our schools, to the exclusion of the local vernacular, would only be that the small proportion of Oriya boys who attend those schools would know the former in addition to the latter, that they would learn to despise their mother-tongue, and that a gap would be created between the mass of the peasantry and the small body of educated persons.

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This result is just what the Bengali would consider proper: from the earliest times in India there has been a chasm, studiously kept open and widened by every effort, between the higher and educated classes and the lower and uneducated,—"this people that knoweth not the law is accursed." Bengalis would like to maintain this, because it throws all influence into their hands, and delivers the wretched peasant, bound hand and foot by the chains of ignorance, into the power of his oppressors. If we wish to see this huge seething mass of ignorance, vice, and superstition permeated by the light of truth and knowledge, we are bound to fight tooth and nail against the Bengali theory, and, by upholding the speech of the land-folk and helping them to purify and improve it, to render it impossible for interested persons to establish any barrier between the free intercourse of all classes of society. Philology in this case has a vital and practical importance. Looked at from the purely linguistic side there is no doubt that Oriya has ample proof of its individuality. The poems of Upendro Bhanj and his contemporaries are written in a language which hardly differs in a single word or inflection from the vernacular of to-day, and every word of which is distinctly intelligible to the meanest labourer.

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These poems, written three hundred years ago, exhibit a perfectly settled modern language, partly analytical and partly synthetical, but the analytical element of which has been so long in use as to have already undergone modifications of a secondary and even tertiary character. It retains unchanged forms which are older than the oldest Bengali or Hindi, and others which can only be compared with Bengali forms of three centuries ago, but which have long since died out from that language. Bidyapati, the contemporary of Upendro, writes, as we have seen, in a language more akin to Hindi than to modern Bengali. At a period when Oriya was already a fixed and settled language Bengali did not exist; the inhabitants of Bengal spoke a vast variety of corrupt forms of eastern Hindi. It is not till quite recent times that we find anything that can be with propriety called the Bengali language.