Bengali
Bengali, like Urdu and Hindi, is one of the New Indo-Aryan languages. It is spoken in West Bengal, Bangladesh (where it is the state language) and in neighboring areas. After Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu), Bengali is the second largest language on the Indian subcontinent, with more than 200 million speakers, and one of the largest languages in the world. Less well known is that Bengali is also the largest mother tongue of South Asian Muslims: about one in seven Muslims in the world speaks Bengali.
Bengali is the medium of a literary history of about one thousand years, in which both Hindu and Muslim traditions developed. Bengali literature gained great importance especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, when Calcutta became the intellectual center of colonial India and the crystallization point of South Asian modernity. Some Bengali authors attained the status of modern classics, whose significance reaches far beyond Bengal's borders, above all the Bengali Nobel Prize winner for literature, Rabindranath Tagore.
To this day, Bengal, and Calcutta in particular, invokes its vital intellectual culture, which is reflected, among other things, in a lively cultural scene and high-quality publications in the humanities.
Studying Bengali offers:
access to the largest language of the eastern subcontinent and contact with one of the great South Asian regional cultures; insight into one of the subcontinent's most important modern literatures;
diverse material especially on the British colonial period and modernity (interesting for literary scholars, historians of religion, political scientists, etc.);
access to a lively intellectual tradition.
