Presenter
NEWBOLD THOMAS - BRAC UNIVERSITY, brac university, DHAKA, BangladeshPanel
72 – Does faith speak only one tongue? Multilingual pathways of religious writing across South Asia and beyond, c. 1600-1850Abstract
In June 1839, pandit Bidyābāgīś, Rammohun’s successor at the helm of the Brāhma Samāj, proposed that in so far as any “vernacular” language (bhāṣā) was only a conveyance (bāhaksvarūpa) for the knowledge necessary to ethical transformation, the question of mediums of instruction for dharma was ultimately just one of linguistic convenience: dharma may be conveyed in any language. Not everyone was convinced of the same: in the first issue of his new 1841 periodical Bidyādarśana Akshay Kumar Datta’s (1820-1886) insisted it would be his mission to rescue an “almost deceased” (mritaprāẏ bhāṣā) Bengali language, useless for true moral instruction, by coining technical neologisms that would instead allow Bengalis to pursue true dharma in ways not dissimilar from those pursued by the philosophers of enlightenment Europe, and in particular by the Scottish tradition of moral intuitionism. In my presentation ‘a new language for dharma?’ I will discuss how in the course of said debates on the relation of Dharma to language Bengalis altered the semantic range of long-established Sanskrit philosophical terms, found a way to signify un Bengali new concepts drawn from the grammar of early nineteenth century European though and ultimately produced a fierce debate on the productive catachresis that resulted from such efforts.
