Bengali

Bengali carries religious literature from several traditions, and its earliest surviving specimens belong to none of the ones a reader might expect. The Charyapada are Buddhist tantric songs of realisation, composed by siddhas in an early eastern Indo-Aryan form and preserved because a manuscript was found in Nepal, and they stand at the beginning of Bengali literature.

The Vaishnava movement that followed Chaitanya in the sixteenth century made Bengali a devotional language of the first rank. Its lyrics on Radha and Krishna, its lives of Chaitanya and its theology of divine love were composed in Bengali and in Brajabuli, a literary hybrid, and the kirtan tradition that carries them is still performed. Edward Dimock's study of the Sahajiya current examines the more esoteric wing of that world, whose practices were held closely and whose texts are deliberately obscure.

The Shakta poets are the other great strand. Ramprasad Sen in the eighteenth century, and the tradition after him translated by Rachel Fell McDermott, address Kali directly, argue with her, complain to her and refuse to let her go, in a register of intimacy with a terrifying goddess that has no close parallel elsewhere in Indian devotion.

Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language, described in the survey edited by George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain, and it is spoken by well over two hundred million people in Bangladesh and in the Indian state of West Bengal. Its religious literature therefore belongs to a Muslim majority country and a Hindu majority state at the same time, and the Muslim Bengali tradition, including the punthi literature and a large body of devotional song, is often left out of accounts written from one side of that border.

Nineteenth century Calcutta made Bengali a language of religious reform. The Brahmo Samaj, founded by Ram Mohan Roy in 1828, argued in Bengali for a monotheistic Hinduism without images, and against sati, which was prohibited by regulation in the Bengal Presidency the following year. Ramakrishna, who taught in Bengali and in parables, and Vivekananda, who carried a version of that teaching abroad, both came out of the same setting.

Language itself then became a political and religious question. The movement to defend Bengali against the imposition of Urdu in Pakistan produced deaths in Dhaka in 1952 and, in time, the independence of Bangladesh, and the day is now observed internationally as a mother language day.