Saturday, June 23, 2007

Revival of Nalanda and real politics


The idea was first propounded by President Kalam and enthusiastically sought to be implemented by the Govt of Bihar. In a remarkable show of pan global view, the Dy CM of Bihar announced the name of Prof Amartya Sen as Chairman of the proposed Nalanda University.

But what do we see? Pranab Mukherjee is trying to monopolise the idea as a diplomatic masterstroke to fight Chinese hegemony in south east asia and the our easterly neighbours still thinking of creation of Bihar in 1913 as a insult to them (thank god it is a miniscule minority now) are pushing their narrow regional agenda.

Read this article in the TOI :

An ancient institution to be re-built with the help of several nations including China is first sought to be reduced to a tool of real politik in the hands of Pranab Mukherjee and then Shilbhadra is projected as a Bengali!! Did Bengal or Bengali language even exist in the seventh century? Maithil Kokil Vidyapati is seen by some linguists as the first poet of Bengali language and he was born much later!

There is not even a mention of the 500 acres of land that the govt of Bihar is acquiring for the university. Why dont we leave at least a few things alone for overall betterment than put real politics into everything?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just keep waiting. The next gem from these Bongs would be when they start shouting that Pranab Mukherjee was the foreign minister during the times of Chandragupta Maurya.

Politicians would always remain politicians. But pity is that journalistic standards have fallen so low that these days journalists perhaps don't even know what they are writing about. Laughable is a better term to describe journalists who write article like the one from TOI that you have mentioned.

santoshpandeyca said...

Dear Friends, wqe must object to these journalist who are making an attempt to "Bengalise" the whole issue of revival of Nalanda university.Lets bring out this issue on every possible plateform.

santoshpandeyca said...

Friends I wasa doing some online search related to this topic and came through this site http://www.geocities.com/raqta24/bangla3d.htm

The writer seems to be a Banaladeshi, and is trying to write History of Bangladesh.It also has a mention of Shilbhadra as a Bengalee, and there is also a mention that Bengali scholars helped in establishing the Nalanda University.

How ridiculous.

I am just wodering if we caqn carry out some research on the Bangla Language it self and try to find out how old it is? And hence establish beyond a reasonable doubt of an one that Bagla or Bangalees had nothing to do with Nalanda or Nalanda University orBudhism for that matter.

santoshpandeyca said...

Folks , I did some googling and found something which might be of our interest here.

History of Bengali Language:

Bengali or Bangla (বাংলা, IPA: ['baŋla]) is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit, Pāli and Sanskrit languages.

Bengali is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. With nearly 230 million native speakers, Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world (it is ranked fourth in the world[3]). Bengali is the main language spoken in Bangladesh; in India, it is ranked as the second[4][5] most spoken language. Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-Iranian languages.

[edit] History
Like other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali arose from the eastern Middle Indic languages of the Indian Subcontinent. Magadhi Prakrit, the earliest recorded spoken language in the region and the language of the Buddha, had evolved into Ardhamagadhi ("Half Magadhi") in the early part of the first millennium CE. Ardhamagadhi, as with all of the Prakrits of North India, began to give way to what are called Apabhramsa languages just before the turn of the first millennium.[6] The local Apabhramsa language of the eastern Subcontinent, Purvi Apabhramsa or Apabhramsa Abahatta, eventually evolved into regional dialects, which in turn formed three groups: the Bihari languages, the Oriya languages, and the Bengali-Assamese languages. Some argue for much earlier points of divergence—going back to even 500 CE[7] but the language was not static; different varieties coexisted and authors often wrote in multiple dialects. For example, Magadhi Prakrit is believed to have evolved into Apabhramsa Abahatta around the 6th century which competed with Bengali for a period of time.[8]

Usually three periods are identified in the history of Bengali:[6]

Old Bengali (900/1000 CE–1400 CE)—texts include Charyapada, devotional songs; emergence of pronouns Ami, tumi, etc; verb inflections -ila, -iba, etc. Oriya and Assamese branch out in this period.
Middle Bengali (1400–1800 CE)—major texts of the period include Chandidas's Srikrishnakirtan; elision of word-final ô sound; spread of compound verbs; Persian influence. Some scholars further divide this period into early and late middle periods.
New Bengali (since 1800 CE)—shortening of verbs and pronouns, among other changes (e.g. tahar → tar "his"/"her"; koriyachhilô → korechhilo he/she had done).
Historically closer to Pali, Bengali saw an increase in Sanskrit influence during the Middle Bengali (Chaitanya era), and also during the Bengal Renaissance. Of the modern Indo-European languages in South Asia, Bengali and Marathi retain a largely Sanskrit vocabulary base while Hindi and others are more influenced by Arabic and Persian.

Until the 18th century, there was no attempt to document the grammar for Bengali. The first written Bengali dictionary/grammar, Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes, was written by the Portuguese missionary Manoel da Assumpcam between 1734 and 1742 while he was serving in Bhawal.[9] Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, a British grammarian, wrote a modern Bengali grammar(A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778)) that used Bengali types in print for the first time.[10] Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the great Bengali Reformer, also wrote a "Grammar of the Bengali Language" (1832).

During this period, the Choltibhasha form, using simplified inflections and other changes, was emerging from Shadhubhasha (older form) as the form of choice for written Bengali.[11]

Bengali was the focus, in 1951–52, of the Language movement (Bhasha Andolon) in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).[12] Although Bengali speakers were more numerous in the population of Pakistan, Urdu was legislated as the sole national language. On February 21, 1952, protesting students and activists walked into military and police fire in Dhaka University and three young students and several others were killed. Subsequently, UNESCO has declared 21 February as International Mother Language Day. In a separate event in May 1961, police in Silchar, India, killed eleven people who were protesting legislation that mandated the use of the Assamese language

Unknown said...

the writer seems to be amuslim fundamentalist as he doesnt want nalanda univ destroyed by punk muslims to reghlorify the hindu mythology.