Recently a number of articles are appearing in the two SCBs , mainly contributed by non-bengali BJP sympathisers and some fence-sitters , which keeps on their age-long infamous and failed endeavour for a schism within the Bengali community along religious lines . As an accessory tool they have an apparent palliative of cursory(and most irresponsible ) mention of Bengal renaissance and specifically about Bankim and Vivekananda. They keep on doing so stating that Islam is ALIEN to Bengal (India) and the Muslims are to be cleared off. I propose to approach the idea of some culture being ALIEN to the development of Bengali civilization and check their proposition out on the basis of the historical progression and finding out the direction in which we bengalees have always preferred to stick to . The concept of "us" and "they" has been inimical to the history of Bengal and presently in West Bengal is exactly what I wish to point out. In doing so I also propose to extrapolate the same conclusion in case of the whole of India as the case in case her is very much similar to the specific case of Bengal barring some provincial specificity .
EARLY START OF BENGAL & BENGALEE:
The civilization of Bengal developed not with the start of any political or territorial unit carved out from any geographical or political imperative . The part of India was not neglected from the mainland point of view other than some very infrequent casual mentions in the purans and that too every time with a different name and at highly temporally separated contexts . Never there was any consistent description of this part of the country or of the region even as enemy territory . The myth construed that this region is so outlandish that this is a different lok , somewhere in between martya lok and patallok . As the powers in India became centralized the ostracization went on aggravated and it was prescribed that if anyone crosses Rajmahal hilly region they are would not be allowed to come back to the "Punyabhumi" unless one goes through a complex process of atonement and purification.This was at its peak at the period which the BJP/VHP/SS gang say the "golden period" of India -the Gupta period. This ostracization was met by a sense of independance and sovereignity from the Bengalees . Bengal could never be conquered by North-Indians (due also too her terrain "alien" to the drylanders the Aryans).The people which flourished in the Bengal soil came up on their own without a strong communication from the North of India and thus they had to internalize all the other local and neighbouring essentially non-aryan elements . Occasional intrusions from Aryabhumi was also taken in as the strategy and methodology of building up was inclusivity and internalization .
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE :
Language was the only defining factor in the development of Bengalee civilization . This language came out of a Prakrit root and then after the different Prakrits were standardized or sanskrtized (reformed) into Sanskrit and even after that when Sanskrit took another lower denomination into Pali ,Bengalee started taking shape . But the script stuck to its own prakrit root in the present form and rejected totally the Nagri script of the standard language . This difference and independance allowed Bangla to take into it more no-sanskrit words or indigenous words and forms , even the grammar is not collinear to the Sanskrit or NAgri languages . (There is a strong debate whether the Vidyasagar propounded grammar based on Tatsama and atbhava patterns is the real bengali grammar or not ) . The oldest evidence of Bangla is the Budhist CHaryapad which took its shape from ballads and experiences of the day to day life of North Bengal where the Budhist-roving monks moved around and collected from villagers. This phenomenon immediately put in a very heavy dose of people-factor and the 'field-factor' into the language , Bangla was never developed in the closets or covered atmosphere of the intellectuals , this language was right from the beginning a peoples' language and a collective language of the expressions of the people and was not institutionalised or regimented , this was never used as a divine or scriptural language(until very recently when Chaitanya Charitamrito was written -that too the lnaguage was very much 'unsophisticated ' and raw as the people's tongue-that was anyway the idea of the Bhakti movement) ,no institutional epics were written and subsequently attributed a divine value to it , all the great epics from Vidyasundar, Vidyapati, mangalkavya etc were sagas of the common working people and stories of day-to-day life mytholgized(not mythified) later on , the style of the latter was taken in from the Jatak's fables of the budhist influence (vide Humayoon Azad's 'The biography of Bengali language') .Due to the collective strategy in developing its own language Bangla was very much akin to taking in more words ,expressions, ideas,forms and structures of all languages whichever came into contact and stayed and were cutivated in the Bangal soil , as an example Bangla has more Farsi elements than even urdu has -take the case of conjunctions of Farsi which is not their in urdu, it stuck to the Hindi conjuctives )(vide the research papers coming out of the Paschimbanga Irani society from Calcutta). More Portugese and Dutch words came into Bangla than any other indian languages , one example is the argot called "Mairee" -it has come from the portugese expression of swearing by MARY. (Vide Organisation and development of Bengali Language by Suniti Chatterjee for more details and Bangladesher ancholik abhidan by Dr. Mohammed Sahidhulla- for the benifit of the BJP sympathisers Dr.Shahidulla was the principal of Sanskrit College of Calcutta and still regarded as the most authentic source of Sanskrit in Bengal).This cuture of collectivization of the language BAngla gave Bengalee civilisation the tradition of syncretization much more pronounced than the rest of India .