Birth Anniversary of Pramatha Chaudhuri today

On this day in 1868, Pramatha Chaudhuri, a Bengali writer and an influential figure in Bengali literature, was born.

He was one of the architects of Chalita Bhasha.  His magazine, Sabuj Patra, plays a huge part in making more and more place for the traditional high Bengali with its stilted Sanskritik elements as a form of spoken Bengali and the 'current' Bengali being considered an effective medium of literature of Bengal.

Pramatha Chaudhuri's literary productions, though little before the Sabuj Patra phase, gave adequate indication of his aptitude as an author. The preparation for the Sabuj Patra movement went on invisibly between 1880 and 1914. His works occasionally appeared in the periodicals, Sadhana and Bharati, influenced by Brahmo Samaj and run by the Tagore household and the Sahitya, an orthodox Hindu journal edited by Suresh Chandra Samajpati. Chaudhuri's Bengali translation of Etruscan Vase by French author Prosper Mérimée of whom Tagore incidentally tried to dissuade him from translating, with an essay named Adim Manavi (First Woman) appeared in Sahitya in 1891. Chaudhuri's representation of Carmen, from French, never published. He wrote Torquato Tasso Ebang Tanhar Sidhha Betaler Kathopokathan, a translated piece from Italian, for Sadhana in 1893.

In his 1902 essay Kathar Katha, Chaudhuri expressed: "I love the Bengali language and admire Sanskrit too. But admiration does not necessarily mean blind adherence – at least I do not belong to that school of thought. My writing pulsates with life only when its language is the way I speak it. I will therefore advocate uniformity between the written and the spoken word – disharmony I hate most… We should go all out to whet our language, unloading all unnecessary burdens. “