Indian Antiquary Vol 62

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 50

THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ MARCH, 1933
Bangalah as the national name. In the various biographies of Chaitanya written in the six. teenth and seventeenth centuries, we are told that he travelled to Vanga or East Bengal, where he used to make fun of the people by imitating their pronunciation, a thing which they resented. The same thing is done now among the people of Western Bengal, who never let an occasion go when they can parody the Bangal pronunciation. Western Bengal, with Nadiya as its centre, was known as Gauda : Gauda and Vaiga are also used in the early (preMuslim) inscriptions to denote West and East Bengal. When Rammohan Rây wrote his Bengali Grammar, about 1830, he called it Gaudiya bhâşâr Vyakaran. M. Madhu-Súdan Datta in his epic Meghanädavadha Kavya (in the seventies of the last century) refers to the Bengali. speaking people as Gaudajana. The old tradition is carried on in two recent publications of the Varendra Research Society of Rajshahi-Gouda-lekha-mala and Gauda-rajamála. It is through foreign influence and example, namely of the Persian-cmploying Muslims, of the people of Upper India and the Portuguese and the English, that Bangalah-Bengal was given to the whole province as its proper name.”
He then passed to a very brief consideration of the term 'City of Bengala' in its various forms, originating in the works of Portuguese writers; "I read a few years ago a monograph by Babu Birendranath Basu Thâkur in Bengali seeking to locate the City of Bengal' in the Dacca District. In this book he quoted amply from Portuguese and other travellers in English-evidently taking much pains over his work. The view he put forward was that the City of Bengal' of the early European travellers is Sunârgâon in the Dacca District, i.e., in Eastern Bengal. Babu Amulya Charan Vidyabhûşana, Professor of Pali in Calcutta and a well-known writer on Bengali history and antiquities of Bengal, at one time studied the question of the City of Bengal,' or as he calls it of Bengalla,' and agrees with the above view. Indeed, I found that many of his arguments had been incorporated in Birendranath Basu Thakur's monograph."
Dames, in his very fine edition of Barbosa and in the very careful note he made on the City of Bengala,' however, took another view of the question, as noted in 1923 in my long review of his book (ante, vol. LII,“ Some discursive comments on Barbosa"): "I propose now to confine myself to the remark that he rejects Chittagong, Sunârgâou and Satgåou, and finally fixes on 'Gaur taken together with its subsidiary ports' as the place known as Bangaln in the early part of the sixteenth century."
Personally, I feel sure that Dames was wrong in this identification, and Heawood, writing in the Geographical Journal in 1921, was of the same opinion: “One of the puzzles that will probably be never definitely solved is that of the identity of the city spoken of by early travellers under the name Bengala (or Banghella) as the chief commercial emporium of the kingdom of the same name. It has been discussed (among others) by Mr. G. P. Badger in his edition of Varthema's Travels, and by Sir Henry Yule both in Cathay and in HobsonJobson. The latter gave the weight of his great authority in favour of the identification with Chittagong, holding that it was a case of transferring the name of a country to one of its principal cities or ports, a habit which he attributed to the Arabs generally. The latest [in 1921) and most thorough discussion of the problem is that of Mr. Longworth Dames in the second volume of his admirable edition of Barbosa (the first writer after Varthema to mention the city as 'Bengala '), lately published by the Hakluyt Society. Mr. Dames devotes to the subject a note extending to nine pages of small type, in which, after summarizing all the evidence extant and the views of previous commentators, he gives it as his opinion that by Bengala' the old capital Gaur, taken together with its subsidiary port or ports (Sat. gaon or Sunargaon or both), is intended. A striking piece of evidence in favour of this is the mention of Gaur-Bengala,' apparently as one city, in an inscription at Kandahar dating from 1594. Mr. Dames contests Yule's view that the Arabs were accustomed to use the name of a country for its principal town, though they occasionally, he says, followed the reverse custom. Yet he allows that the city of Gaur took its name from the country, and