Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty Publisher: BookRix ISBN: 3748788703 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 114
Book Description
Naru, a curious Bengali by birth, was influenced by the presence of large ferocious rivers around his birthplace since his childhood. It occurred to him that the rivers of his birthplace have something to say, and he needs to lend a careful ear to the message that the rivers wanted to convey. The land of the five rivers has a special place in Indian tradition. The ancient Indian scripts and texts contain references to the land of five rivers that was considered blessed and sacred. Naru grew up by listening and reading many of such texts. Nobody could identify the concerned rivers as well as the location of that region of five male rivers. That issue always eluded the Indians. It was the convergence of many aspects of his life that he could see the issue of the land of five male rivers in a new light. This book is about the establishment of a relationship between that unresolved issue and the Rarh region of Bengal and a group of Bengalis known as ‘Ghoti’.
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty Publisher: BookRix ISBN: 3755459795 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 168
Book Description
The capital city of Bangladesh, situated in the eastern part of the geographical entity known as the Bengal Basin, is Dhaka. The word Dhaka, when used as a place name, is a noun, and it is a unique application of that word. That word has not been used anywhere else to name a place. Apart from having its use as a proper noun, the word ‘Dhaka’ finds its place in Bengali language dictionaries as an adjective, and that is the predominant use of that word. Many experts have put forward a number of explanations regarding the evolution of that place name. All those explanations are derived ones, i.e., none of those explanations can relate that name to that place in a directly meaningful manner. With the intervention of his ‘Wisp’ in his cerebral journey, Naru, the main character of this series of books, stumbled upon the idea that, deep in the past, there could have existed an island-mountain at the centre of the place that is currently known as ‘Bengal Basin’. The most famous island-mountain in history is known as 'Atlantis', as described by Greek philosopher Plato. The geological and geographical settings of the Bengal Basin can almost seamlessly fit into the description of Atlantis. The place-name ‘Dhaka’, may be explained satisfactorily and without the application of the idea of being derived, when the concept of a drowned island-mountain is introduced in that geography. In that situation, ‘sonar Bangla’, ‘the golden Bengal’, the other iconic phrase of Bengal, becomes a reflection of reality rather than a metaphor. Naru undertook a cerebral journey to find the validity of this idea in the available facts from various lines of study.
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty Publisher: BookRix ISBN: 3755436868 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
Naru embarked on a lifelong cerebral journey to find answers to a few questions that had appeared in his mind very early in his life. It was only in his mid-forties that he got the chance to start organising the thoughts and experiences that he had gathered thus far. A little before that time, he came into contact with the 'Wisp'. That chance encounter had a big impact on the progress of his search. Without being present in tangible format in his world, 'Wisp' guided Naru's quest in an enigmatic way for a long time. Naru crossed one hurdle after another to arrive at his own explanations of the concepts of Bangla, the origin of the term 'Bangal', the naming of 'Banga', etc. He thought that his journey was over and that he had been able to achieve what he intended to. That's when he felt the presence of a spectre in the past of the Bengal Basin. His search convinced him that all the travellers in history who dealt with the Bengal Basin felt its presence. Like all the previous travellers, he also lost his way to reach that phase of Bengal's history that precedes the presence of the spectre. There was a void. He called the simulated form of his 'Wisp' that he had successfully created in his mind to make up the emptiness that the absence of the 'Wisp' caused. The direction from the 'Wisp' was not sufficient to breach the barrier posed by the void. He took the virtual 'Wisp' to the place where they first met a long time ago. This time he tried to use the 'Wisp' as an instrument of his journey instead of an enigmatic direction giver. He achieved success in his effort. 'Wisp' broke the barrier posed by the void and took Naru to the other side of that barrier. The new light that illuminated the distant horizon of the history of the Bengal Basin had the capability to solve a great number of mysteries that are associated with that basin.
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty Publisher: BookRix ISBN: 3755407116 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Europeans have known since time immemorial that somewhere in the east there is a country where the River Ganges flows. Ptolemy’s world map gives testimony to that. Many more, even older references, may be mentioned in that regard. Before the advent of Jesus Christ, some Europeans wrote first-hand accounts of that land. The Greek and Roman empires met the destiny that every empire meets eventually. Subsequently, Europe plunged into a chaotic phase that led to the free downfall of that society. When Europe regained itself once again and started its journey into what we call ‘modern times', at that time, unfriendly empires emerged between Europe and the land of the Ganges. For various reasons, the land of the Ganges has been something that has attracted the world towards it since time immemorial. Modern Europeans circumvented the African continent from west to east, just before the end of the fifteenth century and reached India. However, they could not reach the true ‘land of the Ganges’ until they reached the Bengal Basin. The British got the chance to start ruling a significant portion of the ‘land of the Ganges’ before they placed themselves at the helm of the affairs of the whole country, i.e., India. Ultimately, in that land, they came to know about some ancient literature that started writing a new chapter in history. The Europeans started unearthing an almost forgotten civilization. Whatever progress could be made was due to the progress in the scientific and technological fields. Like many other things, their efforts came to an abrupt end around the middle of the 20th century. From the ancient texts, it could be found that there was mention of a land called ‘Banga’ in the eastern part of India in the most distant past, in the existence of that land. Although some logical, analysis-based explanations have been put forward for the advent of the word ‘Bangla’, with respect to the word ‘Banga’, not much progress could be made. No reason-based or tangib
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 120
Book Description
Naru was shown by destiny that the process of peopling India had happened along ancient elevated highway systems of India. Adivasis came first then a different group followed them to get settled in the highlands. In Bengal the members of this new group later became known as 'Ghoti'.
Author: Willem van Schendel Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108620337 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 459
Book Description
Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's state-of-the-art history navigates the extraordinary twists and turns that created modern Bangladesh through ecological disaster, colonialism, partition, a war of independence and cultural renewal. In this revised and updated edition, Van Schendel offers a fascinating and highly readable account of life in Bangladesh over the last two millennia. Based on the latest academic research and covering the numerous historical developments of the 2010s, he provides an eloquent introduction to a fascinating country and its resilient and inventive people. A perfect survey for travellers, expats, students and scholars alike.
Author: Steven Pinker Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0062032526 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 578
Book Description
"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.
Author: Manoranjan Byapari Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited ISBN: 9789381345139 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Winner of The Hindu Prize 2018 (Non-fiction) Shortlisted for the 3rd JIO MAMI Word to Screen Award 2018 If you insist that you do not know me, let me explain myself … you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. I’ve seen this man. With these words, Manoranjan Byapari points to the inescapable roles all of us play in an unequal society. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit is the translation of his remarkable memoir Itibritte Chandal Jivan. It talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent want—an experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24—it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication. Today, as Sipra Mukherjee points out, ‘issues of poverty, hunger and violence have exploded the cautiously sewn boundaries of the more affluent world’, rendering archaic the comfortable distances between them. Despite ‘Chandal’ explicitly referring to a Dalit caste, this narrative weaves in and out of the margins.
Author: Donald Loritz Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780195348613 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
How can an infinite number of sentences be generated from one human mind? How did language evolve in apes? In this book Donald Loritz addresses these and other fundamental and vexing questions about language, cognition, and the human brain. He starts by tracing how evolution and natural adaptation selected certain features of the brain to perform communication functions, then shows how those features developed into designs for human language. The result -- what Loritz calls an adaptive grammar -- gives a unified explanation of language in the brain and contradicts directly (and controversially) the theory of innateness proposed by, among others, Chomsky and Pinker.
Author: Yaron Matras Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 3110291428 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 480
Book Description
Domari is an Indo-Aryan language that is now highly endangered. Its speakers were traditionally nomadic metalworkers and musicians who lived in tiny, geographically scattered and socially isolated communities throughout the Middle East. The grammar is based on conversational material recorded in Jerusalem in the mid-1990s with some of the last speakers of this particular variety.
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Author: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Author: Willem van Schendel
Author: Steven Pinker
Author: Manoranjan Byapari
Author: Donald Loritz
Author: Yaron Matras