The development of the Bengali language into a formal self-contained written language emerged in the 12^th century with the coming of the Sultanate. It was then that the territorial identity of Bengal was formed as well. Despite Islam being the religion common to Delhi and Bengal, the rulers in Bengal were somewhat more jealous of protecting a geographical area over which a distinct economy developed of the small peasant as large farms were difficult due to marshy and moist land that was often thickly wooded or densely vegetated. Language constituted a certain pattern of social relationships with in-built mechanisms of oppression too.  

Indeed, then the tension within the language namely a Sanskritized Bengali spoken by the “outsiders’’ or the colonisers namely in the form of the upper caste Hindus and the native Bengali with their varied dialects being closer to the Prakrit. Interestingly, the language of the native Bengali was closer to Magadhi, or the language spoken in a large part of Bihar while the Sanskritized Bengali was quite distinct from any other language spoken in any other part of India. Bengali, we know today is really this Sanskritized language. This version, rather than the Prakrit leaning language bound itself within the borders called as Bengal in the modern form.

Shashanka was a ruler of Bengal, so were the Senas and the Palas but the Bengal of the ancient or early medieval times was not the same Bengal of contemporary times. It was the Vaishnav movement of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu that the Sanskritized Bengali seemed to have found its niche. The Vaishnav movement was a movement of the moist soil, it found little resonance beyond Birbhum in the west, Bankura in the North but moved along to coast right into Orissa and thereafter into deeper coastal Andhra. Much of the reasons for the development of the Bengali language into its own syntax and tone and especially its dissociation from Magadhi and Maithili was due to the Chaitanya movement. The Bengali language exuded a power, the moral power of the Vaishnav as a rising class of the educated and the knowledgeable, who taught, wrote down accounts and coded laws. As Bengal grew into a rich business community, the need for writing and records was important and soon the Bengali language spilled too into a poetic and lyrical avatar, acquiring much of the sweetness it is now known for.

The fillip to Bengali came of course with the Bengal Renaissance when Bengali expressed and heralded the modernity of Bengal, the rise of reason and science and the fight against the dark superstitions. Bengali language expressed the intellectual precision, the cultural acumen and the grandeur of wealth of the Bengalis, culminating in Rabindranath Tagore. Thereafter the language continued, Bibhutibhushan, Tarashankar et al, the Kallol and the Nabakallol writers who wrote more flowingly, sentimentally, descriptively, emotionally but also in a more pedestrian style. They emanated from the mind of the middle-class subordinate of the government or of large corporate capital but no longer as Tagore and his predecessors would write from the vantage point of a ruler class.

The change in the social class of the writer from a zamindar to a salaried employee of large capital or the government reduced the ambitions of the Bengali and relegated the ambitions of the language from writing science and technology, law and philosophy into only a set of grievances and despair. Bengali became a language of loss and it lost its ability to be philosophical, moral, scientific, rational, legal and of course, formal. As Bengali becomes inadequate for the expression of formal matter, impersonal stuff, and official engagement, it loses its ability to change things related to the material world; policy, politics, planning and power. This was totally the opposite of English, where poetry fell and the novel declined and English was only a language for official communication, more and more emptied of the emotional content. English became universal but collapsed as a creative culture.

To revive the Bengali language, one must revive the Bengali; the power of a language depends on the power of the speaker. If power is to return to the language, then power must return to the Bengali. For power, the Bengali must again return to command the ideology, to command capital, to command property and then politics.