Amit Malviya is correct that Sylheti is not the same as Bengali. But what he and his team seem to lack is any sense of the history beyond that statement.
Bengalis are hurt over a statement by the Delhi police calling Bangla a ‘Bangladeshi language’ and the lines Azad sang have unwittingly become protest music in Kolkata now.
On 29 May 1951, Jawaharlal Nehru defended adding 'reasonable restrictions' to Article 19, arguing that free speech must be balanced with national security and unity.
This is the game every nation is now learning to play. Some are finding new allies or seeing value among nations where they’d seen marginal interest. The starkest example is India & Europe.
The piece is highly disappointing. In a modern age when intellect is what is celebrated, it is unfortunate that the writer has chosen to delve into issues of caste while writing a piece on how a particular language is spoken by people at different places. The “sadhu bhasha” (chaste language) brought in formal grammar and structure, as we understand it today, to a language which always had innumerable dialects. The “sadhu bhasha” exists for the same purpose that the Queen’s English does. That said, the “sadhu bhasha” used today is not the same as that employed by the great Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, for example, whose ‘Vande Mataram’ is the National Song of India.
The piece is highly disappointing. In a modern age when intellect is what is celebrated, it is unfortunate that the writer has chosen to delve into issues of caste while writing a piece on how a particular language is spoken by people at different places. The “sadhu bhasha” (chaste language) brought in formal grammar and structure, as we understand it today, to a language which always had innumerable dialects. The “sadhu bhasha” exists for the same purpose that the Queen’s English does. That said, the “sadhu bhasha” used today is not the same as that employed by the great Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, for example, whose ‘Vande Mataram’ is the National Song of India.