”īuilt up over its main Prakrit structure Bengali largely borrowed from Persian language in respect of phonology, vocabulary, morphology and syntax during the course of history of well over 600 years. “The language in which the classical books of Hindoos are written is principally derived from the Sangskrito. For example, in the first edition of William Carey’s A Grammar of the Bengalee Language (1801) he stated: The orientalists’ effort to trace Bengali’s origin in Sanskrit also bolstered this notion. The standardisation process was largely informed by the notion that Sanskrit being the sacred language of Hindus was the purest of all extant languages. If we situate Jaygopal’s work in its historical context we will see that except the work of Manuel da Assumpção almost all the lexicons produced up to the first half of nineteenth century borrowed heavily from Sanskrit in their attempts to standardise Bengali vocabulary. A few examples from his dictionary are given below: In this deliberate Sanskritisation effort, he coined equivalents of commonly used Persian words in Bengali language following Sanskrit morphology. But what he chose as the native tongue was largely derived from Sanskrit words instead of everyday Bengali words. He suggested “স্বদেশীয় সাধুভাষা” (native chaste language/high Bengali dialect) as the true alternative. Jaygopal defines purity as cleansing the Bengali language altogether of Persian words. At the beginning, Tarkalanker explains his effort to collate Persian words used in Bengali language to replace them with Bengali equivalents so that “the purity of Bengali language could be preserved, and the language could be salvaged from the humiliation inflicted by 900 years of Muslim rule in India.” In Parsik Abhidhan, Jaygopal collected more than 2,500 Persian words. In 1824, he was appointed as a lecturer in vernacular literature at Sanskrit College and worked there until his retirement in 1845. He was associated with three famous orientalists of his time: HT Colebrooke, William Carey and JC Marshman. Jaygopal was a renowned Sanskrit scholar. Jaygopal’s Parsik Abhidhan is one of the earliest specimens of Persian-Bengali bilingual dictionary. In James Long’s A Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Works (1855) this dictionary is enlisted along with two other Persian-Bengali lexicons published in the same year from Calcutta: A Persian and Bengali Vocabulary by Lakshmi Narayan and Paraseabhidhan by Nilkomal Mustaphi. The dictionary was published in 1838, immediately after the abolition of Persian as court language in British India. It is a Persian-Bengali bilingual dictionary compiled by Jaygopal Tarkalanker (1775-1846).
During my recent trip to Kolkata*, I came across a lexicographical work titled Parsik Abhidhan (Persian Dictionary) at the rare section of the National Library of India.
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