History of Bengali Language and Literature c8.16

c8.16

Vaiṣṇava literature has brought many Hindi words into Bengali. In fact a large number of songs in old Vaiṣṇava literature were composed in what is called Vrajavali—a sort of Hindi current in Durbhāṅga. This admixture of Hindi with Bengali was due to the predilection in favour of the dialect of Vṛndāvan on the part of Vaiṣṇava writers. They also adopted it in order to imitate Vidyāpati the great master of songs, who wrote in the Maithila language. But the Hindi words occurring in the works of the Vaiṣṇavas cannot claim a place in the vocabulary of the Bengali language. Outside the pale of Vaiṣṇava literature we come across many Bengali words more or less allied to Hindi and other dialects of Āryyāvarta, the use of which has grown obsolete now. This indicates that Bengali in early times, as we might have surmised, bore a closer affinity than now to other dialects of Northern India, whose origin is Sanskritic. It branched off from the parent language at a remote point of time when the Aryan settlers divided themselves into communities and settled in different parts of the country. So in the past the dialects also were nearer to one another. This fact in the case of Bengali is evidenced by the existence of the following and other similar words in our literature of the 15th and 16th centuries.