A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c4.337.3

v1.c4.337.3

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.