Table Of Contentএপার বাংলা ওপার বাংলা
Bangla across Borders
AN ELEMENTARY LANGUAGE COURSE
Carol Salomon
Nandini Abedin
Klaus Brandl
এপার বাংলা ওপার বাংলা
Bangla across Borders
AN ELEMENTARY LANGUAGE COURSE
Carol Salomon
Nandini Abedin
Klaus Brandl
University of Washington
Copyright 2011 University of Washington. All Rights Reserved.
Epar Bangla Opar Bangla: Bangla Across Borders!
ISBN 978-0-615-52514-3
To Carol Salomon
Carol Goldberg Salomon
July 28, 1948 - March 13, 2009
Carol in Santiniketan, 1980
The books on her desk are the Samsad Bengali-English Dictionary
and Sukumar Sen’s Etymological Dictionary of Bengali, which, along with
the note cards for her dissertation, were her constant companions in those days.
About Carol
Carol was born into a family of modest means but abundant love in New York’s Lower East Side in 1948.
Though a small, frail, shy girl in a rough neighborhood, she felt safe and secure in the warmth of her old-
fashioned extended family, living together with her beloved grandparents and cousins in a tenement building
at the corner of Canal Street and East Broadway. After moving to Brooklyn in 1957, Carol graduated from
Abraham Lincoln High School in 1966 and went on to study at Harpur College (now the State University of
New York at Binghamton) and then at City College of New York, where she graduated with a B.A. in Oriental
Studies in 1970. Like many others of her generation in New York, she was able to rise from the ghetto to
the academy thanks to support from a family which respected and valued education, a social system which
provided virtually free higher education to working class students, and, last but not least, her own diligence,
dedication, and love of learning.
Carol and I were introduced by her cousin, a high school friend of mine, on Thanksgiving day 1967, and
we were together from that day until she died in 2009. We were married in June 1970 and went on together
to graduate school in the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Carol wanted
to study modern Indian languages and literature, and decided to take Bengali instead of Hindi as most of
the other students did. She almost immediately became fascinated with Bengali literature and culture, and
applying her usual talent and dogged persistence, she rapidly became fluent. In 1971 she briefly visited
Calcutta for the first time, and later returned for extended stays there and in Santiniketan in 1975-76 and
1980-81, with side trips to Bangladesh. In the course of these visits she became acquainted with the folk
literature and music of both East and West Bengal, particularly with the Baul tradition in which she was to
become one of the most prominent academic experts, and which held a lifelong fascination for her.
In 1976, Carol had her first and only child, Jesse. Shortly after his birth, we left Philadelphia, eventually
settling permanently in Seattle in 1981. While juggling various teaching positions and maternal duties, Carol
continued her research and finished her dissertation, Govindadāsa’a Kālikāmaṅgal (The Vikramāditya and
Vidyāsundara Sections): An Edition and Translation, in 1983. In repeated visits to both Bengals over these
and the following years she met and gained the confidence of many prominent members of the Baul tradition,
establishing close relationships with them and gathering a unique body of recordings and notes. Although
Carol was a shy and modest person who shunned rather than sought the limelight, she eventually became,
against her own inclinations, something of a celebrity in West Bengal and especially in Bangladesh. Her
unparalleled mastery of the Bengali language and her deep knowledge of Bengal’s literature and culture
brought her respect and renown among both the intellectual elite and the keepers of the rural traditions, and
her death was widely reported in the media in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, Carol had established herself as the most admired senior Bengali teacher in the United States.
At various times she taught Bengali at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and
Cornell University. At the time of her death, she was Senior Lecturer in Bengali in the Department of Asian
Languages and Literature of the University of Washington. She was almost obsessively dedicated to her
students, lavishing abundant attention and concern on every one of them. Her care was naturally reciprocated
by her students, who deeply respected and admired her.
At home, Carol was a devoted mother to her only son, a gentle and loving wife to her husband and companion
of nearly forty-two years, and a dutiful daughter to her aging parents. While we were happy to spend most of
our time together quietly at home, we also enjoyed many adventurous travels together, not only to India and
Bangladesh but also to many destinations around the USA, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
On March 11, 2009, Carol was struck by a car while riding her bicycle to work, as she did every day. (A true
New Yorker to the end, she never learned to drive.) She died two days later without regaining consciousness,
and her untimely death brought a flood of messages of condolence, literally from around the world. Though
much shorter than it should have been, her years were rich in experience and achievement, and above all, full
of the love which she both gave and received freely. In balance, she had a good and happy life.
From the time she was a little girl in Hebrew school, Carol was fascinated by the study of language and was
a fanatical perfectionist about it. This book is in large part the final product of these two qualities. During
the years in which she worked on it, she regularly stayed up long into the night (while I was fast asleep),
fussing over every detail to be sure that it would be perfect. Although fate did not allow her to see it brought
to completion, it will now stand as a fitting monument to her dedication, energy and intelligence, and I am
deeply indebted to Nandini Abedin and Klaus Brandl for seeing that her work was finished. There could be no
more better tribute to her memory and her lifelong dedication to the language, literature and culture of Bengal
than this book, which will enable another generation to benefit from her legacy and her love of Bangla.
Richard Salomon
Seattle, March 8, 2011
FOREWORD
The adventure you are about to embark upon, the learning of Bangla (also known as Bengali), should be
exciting and gratifying. It has been said by many, even though no one really seems to know who said it first,
that “the eyes are the windows to the soul.” I’ve always thought that more than eyes, language is the window
to the soul. The language we speak reveals so much about who we are, how we think, how we see ourselves,
how we see the world. You will, as you pursue your adventure, come to know not only Bangla, the language,
but also get a glimpse into the very essence, the very soul of Bengalis, those people who speak this language
as their mother tongue.
Bangla has been ranked as the fourth or the fifth or the sixth most natively spoken language in the world,
depending upon who is doing the ranking. Chinese, with all its dialects, comes first, followed by Spanish,
then English, then Hindi/Urdu, though the relative ranking of these last three varies according to, once again,
who is doing the ranking. Arabic, too, in some ranked lists tops Bangla. Suffice it to say that there are more
native speakers of Bangla worldwide than there are of German or of French, two of the most popular foreign
languages offered at most universities. So, you are venturing out on a study of one of the world’s major
languages.
Bangla, along with Assamese to its north and east, is part of what linguists call the Indo-European family of
languages. Bangla and Assamese are the eastern-most members of this vast language family, a family that
includes our own English as well as most of the languages spoken in Europe. Though Bangla and English are
“genetically related,” do not expect to find the easy and obvious cognates between these two tongues. The
cognates are there, but, unless you are a scholar trained in historical linguistics, they will be nearly impossible
to see or hear. It won’t be as it is in German and French where words that cognate with English are abundant.
There will be, however, as you’ll soon find out, words borrowed from English that have become part and
parcel of the modern Bangla language. The British, as any history student can tell you, ruled South Asia (that
includes Bengal, the Bangla-speaking area within South Asia) as a colony for two hundred years, until 1947.
A legacy of that colonial rule is English. The second language of most educated Bengalis is English. And, as
just noted, another aspect of that legacy is the English words that Bangla speakers have made their own, for
that vocabulary is not at all foreign but truly Bangla today.
To understand just how valued the Bangla language is to a Bengali, try searching the Internet for
“International Mother Language Day.” Since the year 2000, the 21st of February has been declared by the
United Nations as “International Mother Language Day.” That day, as you will see, commemorates the death
of Bengali students in then East Pakistan (subsequently Bangladesh) who were protesting the imposition
of Urdu, to the exclusion of Bangla, as the one and only official language for all of Pakistan, both the west
(present-day Pakistan) and the east (present-day Bangladesh) wings of that bifurcated nation that had come
into existence in 1947. Those killings occurred in 1952. In retrospect, February 21, 1952, has been viewed
as the start of a long process that culminated in 1971 with the Bangladesh War of Independence. There were
other causes of that war, but in the minds of Bengalis one certainly was the defense of Bangla. Bangladesh
is a country founded upon a language, Bangla, the mother tongue of the overwhelming majority of the
inhabitants of that nation. Bangla is one of the many official languages of India and is spoken throughout the
state of West Bengal. Good friends and colleagues of mine in West Bengal, some of them renowned Bangla
writers and scholars, have expressed to me admiration of their Bangladeshi brethren whom they see as having
shed their blood in defense of their beloved Bangla.
With the mention of writers in Bangla, it must be noted that Bangla possesses one of the richest literary
traditions in the world. If you don’t know it already, you will soon learn the name of Rabindranath Tagore,
the 1913 recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, the first and for many, many years the only non-Western
writer to be so honored. A contemporary of Tagore, Nazrul Islam, extraordinarily prolific writer of Bangla
poetry and songs during the middle years of the 20th century, is revered yet today by Bangladeshis as their
Copyright © 2011 University of Washington. All Rights Reserved. Page i
true national poet laureate. Both Tagore and Nazrul Islam are known first and foremost as poets. Many
Bengalis will tell you that Bengalis are a people of poetry. But Bangla literature is more than just poetry, with
magnificent pieces in all conceivable genres. There’s a treasury of literature out there for you to explore.
Those of you who are venturing forth in the study of this beloved language are in luck. Epar Bangla Opar
Bangla represents a quantum leap forward in Bangla textbooks for English speakers. The textbook in use in
the US for the past fifty years, An Introduction to Bengali, Part I, was based upon a pedagogical approach
called “oral/aural” in which it was assumed that adult learners of the language, like children, would learn
best if they heard again and again a proper Bangla utterance and then repeated that same utterance out loud
again and again. Epar Bangla Opar Bangla, on the other hand, is constructed around what is called the
“communicative approach,” which is explained in the textbook itself. The entire project was the brainchild of
Carol Salomon, who, like me, spent her entire professional life studying and writing about Bangla literature
and teaching the Bangla language to college students. The textbook Carol and I learned from was An
Introduction to Bengali, Part I, which proved satisfactory in both our cases. But Carol knew that there was a
better way, that there could be an improvement on how we teach Bangla. She assembled her team consisting
of Nandini Abedin, Klaus Brandl, and Mandira Bhaduri, and together they produced this wonderful textbook
with accompanying audio and video files, a Bangla script tutor, and a workbook. Pedagogically, Klaus was
instrumental in designing the textbook.
Tragically, Carol, while riding her bicycle in Seattle, was struck by a car and died of her injuries. That
happened in the middle of the second year of the three-year project. Nandini valiantly stepped forward and
took responsibility for completing the textbook itself. Klaus also stepped up to ensure the completion of
the textbook. Mandira, coordinating with Nandini, produced the accompanying workbook. What we have
here today is a result of their sincere efforts, with administrative guidance from Paul Aoki, Director of the
Language Learning Center at the University of Washington. My thanks to them all. To you, the students
embarking on your Bangla journey: subha yatra, may your trip be wonderful. I envy you the experience you
are about to have.
Clinton B. Seely, Professor Emeritus
South Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Chicago
March 2011
Page ii Copyright © 2011 University of Washington. All Rights Reserved.
