Bengal

Back in early April I stumbled across my battered copy of the book at reference 2, as noticed at reference 1. Shortly after that, thinking that it was time to retire the battered copy, I bought a new-to-me copy from Joseph Burridge Books, via Abebooks, With Burridge, formerly the SOAS Bookshop & Arthur Probsthain Oriental & African booksellers, now trading online only as Central Books, these last being a shed somewhere in Dagenham, as snapped above.

Arthur Probsthain is to be found at reference 3 and may still exist in bricks & mortar, albeit as a café with a few books in the corner, although I have not pursued that angle. Not sure about Central Books of reference 4 either: I vaguely remember the name as that of a bookshop which was a notorious den of lefties, not to say commies.

The history of the book trade over the last twenty years or so in a nutshell.

I am now about half way through my new copy of the autobiography, and an interesting read it is too, to be noticed properly in due course. In the meantime, my attention was caught this morning by the first partition of Bengal in 1905 - at which time Chaudhuri would have been a ten year old boy living in a fairly secular but Hindu family in what was then a fairly mixed part of Bengal.

I don't think I had ever heard of the first partition before, perhaps crowded out by what turned out to be the much longer lasting second partition of 1947. But Wikipedia was on the case at reference 5, with the partition seeming to have been, at least mostly, a rather clumsy attempt by the colonial authorities to divide and rule, to keep down the emerging nationalist movement. In parallel with our attempts to keep down the contemporary Irish national movement. While the wider story is to be found at reference 6. Like some European counties - Latvia comes to mind - Bengal had a long and glorious history, for long before the Muslim incursion, which was not that long after we were fighting the Battle of Hastings. Notwithstanding which, Bengal remained a rich and populous place and went on to become the centre of British India, until we moved from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911, which move seems to have been all part of undoing the partition of 1905.

And I learn from Ruhlen that Bengali and Hindi are very near neighbours in the great tree of languages. Finding Ruhlen is left as an exercise for the reader. I was also reminded that Sanskrit and Romany are at the top of the Indic list, while Hindi and Bengali are much nearer the bottom.

I shall now go back to the autobiography rather better briefed on the background to the events in which the author participated as a child.

PS 1: the maps of Bengal seems to be split on political lines rather than those of physical geography. With the old map from Alamy turned up by Bing above being missing from my edition of the Times Atlas, put together after the 1947 partition. But it does seem that Bengal once occupied a very large chunk of the best land of the subcontinent. 

PS 2: Bengal has cropped up before, at reference 7. The occasion being my coming across the catastrophic famine in 1942-43 and the equally catastrophic aftermath of disease. Maybe Chaudhuri is going to have something to say about it.

PS 3: the old copy of the autobiography has yet to be retired. There seems to be a sentimental attachment which I can't shake off.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/touching.html.

Reference 2: The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian - Nirad C. Chaudhuri.- 1951. My reading copy from the Macmillan edition of 1951, fifteen years older than the Indian paperback edition noticed at reference 1.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Probsthain.

Reference 4: https://www.centralbooks.com/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Bengal_(1905).

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal.

Reference 7: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-bengal-famine-of-1943.html.