Nathaniel Brassey Halhed - A Grammar of The Bengali Language

A Grammar of The Bengali Language

A great impediment for the administration and trade with the aurungs was the lack of knowledge of Bengali. The East India Company had several employees with varying degrees of knowledge in Persian but there was none who could speak the Bengali dialect with ease. Moreover, the company lacked a confidential translator who could provide some aid in the matter and to this effect Halhed proposed the plan of the Bengal translatorship to the Board of Trade and he himself took the responsibility of executing the proposed plan and set out the first grammar of Bengali, the salaries of the pundits and the scribe who assisted him being paid by Hastings. Difficulty arose while transforming the work to print since, unlike the code, the manuscript could not be sent to England for printing as a Bengali type was needed. This necessitated the establishment of a Bengali Printing press. The Governor-General, who had been in full support of Halhed's work, appointed Charles Wilkins who had been in the Company's civil service in Bengal to undertake a set of Bengali types and the first Bengali Printing Press was set up at Hugli. The actual work of creating the typeface was done by Panchanan Karmakar,under the supervision of Wilkins. Under the recommendation of the Governor-General the book was then accepted as the property of the Company and "a gratuity allowed to those gentlemen of 30 rupees for each copy and…recommended to them to prosecute the work under the sanction and protection of this Government". Wilkins informed the council on 13 November that the printing was completed by which time Halhed had left Bengal for England.

Halhed's Grammar was widely believed at the time to be the first grammar of Bengali, for the Portuguese work of Manoel da Assumpcam, published in Lisbon in 1743, remained largely unknown in Britain and Bengal.