A folklorist supremo: Dinesh Chandra Sen

Dinesh Chandra Sen (1866-1939) was an antiquarian and esteemed scholar who wrote the first history of Bengali literature and conducted pioneering work in Bengali folklore. He helped set up the Bengali department at Calcutta University, where he was Ramtanu Lahiri Professor. He was a tireless researcher, compiler and collector of Bengali folklore, chiefly in the form of East Bengal's gitikas, or folk ballads. Among his prodigious and original contributions to Bengali folklore is the four-volume Eastern Bengal Ballads with its priceless collection of a total of fifty ballads. The first volume of the series contained what has famously come to be known as the Mymensingh gitikas.
Dinesh Chandra Sen's name, however, is not familiar to most readers today. In fact, even back in 1975, his grandson Samar Sen (poet and ex-editor of the '60s Calcutta left-wing Frontier journal) wrote that "(My grandfather's) tireless dedication to Bengali language and literature, his stupendous labours, his travels often on foot over long distances in the cause of research...all this now is all but lost in the depths of oblivion."
Which is a great pity. It is a feeling that grows when we actually read his books. His books have long been recognized as foundational in the study of Bengali folklore, and his penetrating study of the origins of Bengali language remains a milestone of devoted research.
Why delve into folklore? A striking answer was given by Tamil folklorist and poet Ramanujan in his essay 'Who Needs Folklore?': "For starters, I for one need folklore as an Indian studying India. It pervades my childhood, my family, my community. It is the symbolic language of the non-literate parts of me and my culture...In a largely non-literate culture, everyone--poor, rich, high caste and low caste, professor, pundit or ignoramus--has inside him or her a large non-literate subcontinent."
It is this connection with one's childhood and community in terms of an undying symbolic language that these ballads provide, even in these English translations of what was originally published as Purba Banga Gitika. A modern day reader, cannot help but be struck how Dinesh Chandra Sen's introduction to these ballads in these volumes remains, seventy odd years later, a marvel of lucid language, old school scholarship and staunch championship of the Bengali language over the ossified Sanskrit forms and usage. It was the latter's overwhelming influence on Bengali language and literature that had rendered it, according to Dr. Sen, "somewhat exotic and artificial." But these gitikas, he said, "are pure Bengali and there is hardly any obtrusive Sanskritic element in them," where instead of "long and monotonous accounts of mornings and evenings with a catalogue of flower-plants, not omitting the butterflies and the bees sucking honey from them," we get "rural bards (who) do not sit down with the resolve to describe Nature and say something fine," but instead whose "poems mirror life...in which the simple but high life of the Bengalis is portrayed with fine poetic touches."
Dinesh C Sen, noting that "these ballads were sung...generally by Muhammadans and low-caste Hindus," brought to the task of compilation and research the appropriate values of a broad humanistic, secular and liberal outlook. These values at times put him at odds with the narrowly orthodox Calcutta literary establishment of his times, with the latter prone to stating that 'Muslim Bangla' was somehow not the real McCoy (see inset for one of the most lucid articulation of the opposite viewpoint that anyone will ever read).
These volumes of Eastern Bengal Ballads as well as his ground-breaking The Folk Literature of Bengal have been re-issued by Gyan Publishing House (New Delhi, 2006), spurred on by Sila Basak, a folklorist associated with the Kolkata Asiatic Society, who has added her own introduction to them. It is somewhat staggering to note the care lavished by Dr Sen in terms of proof-reading and copy-editing, a thoroughness that is also on display in his massive The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (Delhi: Rupa & Co). Pages and pages, sheets and sheets, acres and acres of print with nary a typo, misspelling, or misprint!
Obviously Dinesh Chandra Sen was a scholar of the old school, who set, and met, standards in original research, writing and publishing that we in our vaunted modern age can only aspire to. Critics, armed with modern-day excavation methodologies, have taken him to task over certain aspects of periodization and authentication relating to the gitikas. Referring to these Samar Sen wrote, "Pundits have gone into his factual errors with a toothcomb. But Bengali literature would have been only so much more enriched had they possessed the tiniest fraction of his staunchness and dedication."
Truer words have not been spoken, and I, for one, after reading Dinesh Chandra Sen, am firmly on the side of Samar Sen and his grandfather!
Farhad Ahmed is a freelance contributor to The Daily Star.

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"In the old modern literature of Bengal which bears the mark of Sanskritic influence on it in a striking manner we find Muhammadan words, i.e., words of Persian or Arabic origin, scrupulously avoided. The writers avoid these exotic words even as an orthodox Brahmin avoids the touch of a Muhammadan after his bath. This grim orthodoxy is extremely to be deplored. The Muhammadans form a very considerable portion of the population of this province, and the majority by far of this population belongs to Eastern Bengal. These people are bound by sacred ties of religion with the people of Persia and Arabia and have to study their literature, theology, law and philosophy. The Muhammadans of Bengal are obliged to read their scriptures written in these classical languages and in this way they get themselves familiar with Arabic and Persian words. Though as children of bengal, Bengali is certainly their mother-tongue, they have as much right to import Arabic and Persian words to it as the Brahmins have to introduce Sanskrit words. The classical languages of Arabia and Persia, no less than Sanskrit, have words of peculiar force and appropriateness which may be imported to our vocabulary with advantage, and this is the most natural course also. Though we try to avoid Arabic and Persian words in written Bengali, which we have made as exclusive as a Hindu temple, we have not been able to exclude such words from our current speech. Dame Nature cares neither for theology nor for orthodoxy and has always her unrestrained course. In our current speech even the women of orthodox Brahmin families, whom we take to be the most fastidious types of intolerance, use these words of exotic origin in their every-day conversation, yet curiously we avoid them scrupulously in our written literature, and thus give offence to our Muhammadan brethren who by way of revenge sometimes try to alienate themselves from all interest in the literature of Bengal which they brand as essentially Hindu in character. I must always say that such orthodoxy is suicidal to the interests of both the sections of our population."