Communal harmony and history
Viewsday Tiewsday goes off the beaten track this week, to present an excerpt from Amartya Sen’s “The Argumentative Indian”. This paragraph highlights an endearing snippet from the history of our country which goes against the grain of extremism often encountered.
The very successful Bengali translations of these epics (the Ramayana and the Mahabharata) owed much to the efforts of the Muslim Pathans kings of Bengal. Dinesh Chandra Sen’s authoritative account of the history of Bengali literature describes the events thus:
The Pathans occupied Bengal early in the thirteenth century.. The Pathan Emperors learned Bengali and lived in close touch with the teeming Hindu population.. The Emperors heard of the far-reaching fame of the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and observed the wonderful influence they exercised in molding the religious and domestic lives of the Hindus, and they naturally felt the desire to be acquainted with the contents of those poems.. They appointed scholars to translate the works into Bengali which they now spoke and understood. The first Bengali translation of the Mahabharata of which we hear was undertaken at the order of Nasira Saha, the Emperor of Gauda [in Bengal] who ruled for 4 years till 1325 A.D…
