PREFACE TO DEVANĀGARI GITĀNJALI

After Rabindranath was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his English Gitanjali, an edition of the Bengali originals of the poems occuring in that book was brought out in the Devanagari script. As a Sanskritic language, written in Bengali with its large percentage of Sanskrit words is easily understood by persons acquainted with Sanskrit and possessing some knowledge of one or the other of the sister-speeches of Bengali, like Hindi or Punjabi, Marathi or Gujarati, Sindhi or Nepali. The Devanagari edition was certainly instrumental in briging the writings of Rabindranath closer to persons knowing Sanskrit and familiar with the Devanagari script.

With a view to bringing the writings of Rabindranath Tagore nearer to the larger group of Indian people able to read the Devanagari, the Visva-Bharati has undertaken to bring out select Bengali works of Rabindranath Tagore in this script.

Already Rabindranath’s Katha, a book of tales and ballads in verse, has been brought out in this style; and the present work in a Devanagari reprint of the Bengali Gitanjali. Readers familiar with Devanagari script and not at home in the Bengali language will be able to get from this some idea of the mellifluousness and beauty of language, if not always the versecadence, of the original. The content of the poems, and to some extent their form, will in this way be largely available for the public which does not read Bengali, though the beauty of the form dependent on Bengali habits of pronunciation will naturally remain to great extent inaccessible, as Bengali pronunciation presents in some points a sharp distinction between the written word and its spoken form.

Such distinctions between the written and the spoken forms of the word are almost universally present in the written languages of the world, particularly in those with a long history and literary tradition. The spelling in most literary languages is more conservative than their phonetic development. We find this true in the case of European languages also, using the Roman script. The same sounds in the different Modern European languages are indicated by different letters or letter-combinations, and a single Roman letter has obtained different values in different languages. Thus, the sounds ch, j and sh as in English are written in different ways in the different modern languages of Europe. These sounds are written respectively as tech, dj and ch in French, tsch, dsch and sch in German, cs, ds, and s in Hungarian, cz, dz and sz in Polish, ci, gi and sci and Italian, etc., etc. The same words and names are often found in different orthographies suiting the pronunciation of different languages. Thus the Slav Name Cvernuski is written in German as Tschernusky, and in Italian as Cernuschi, and Szopen of Polish become Chopin in French.

This type of diversity occurs in the case of many other sounds, both vowel and consonant. To pass from one European language to another written in the same Roman script, a special introduction into the value of the Roman letters in the new language becomes imperatively necessary.

So, too, for the Devanagari and other Indian scripts. The various scripts of medieval and modern India are just sister-forms of writing, and they are all variants of one and the same alphabet. Each of these, as current at the present day, e.g., the Devanagari, the Bengali-Assamese, the Oriya, the Telugu-Kannada, the Malayalam and the Gurumukhi, are just different styles of writing the same basic Indian alphabet, which we find in its earliest completed form in the Brahmi script of the time of Asoka. But as the various modern Indian languages have developed their own habits of articulation, the same script in its diverse forms has developed new values in many matters.

In using one single script for all these variants, with the laudable desire of helping Indian Unity through a common or universally adopted alphabet, one has to face certain limitations and difficulties. Writing so many languages, each with its own phonetic background, in a pan-Indian script like the Devanagari, becomes almost impossible of achievement as a perfectly phonetic system. We have, for instance, the necessity of keeping intact the spellings of the pure Sanskrit words (tatsamas) in all our languages, no matter whatever might be the pronunciation, to retain the unity of the written word.

A short introduction to the new values which the letter of the Devanagari script will perforce have to take when applied in a language like Bengali or Tamil, Assamese or Garhwali, therefore becomes a necessity.

So far as Bengali is concerned, the Devanagari transcription which has been followed in the present Devanagari printing of the Gitanjali presents a compromise between the current Bengali spelling and the Bengali pronunciation as based on Bengali phonology (or history of the development of sounds of Bengali). For example, the words je, jár, jabe, jakhan, jata, jaeno, jáwá etc. are written in Bengali with the Bengali letter = of Devanagari, but the pronunciation has j and not y; this j pronunciation is historically correct, as it has developed through the Prakrit, and in our transcription or = j has been used (which also we find in Hindi, Oriya, Marathi etc.). So the Devanagari = w has been used in the Nagari-Bengali, instead of the clumsy Bengali digraph =. In the Bengali alphabet, distinction is not made between = b and = w — both are indicated by the same letter, pronounced b.

Following the pronunciation as long established in the language, in native Bengali words derived from Prakrit = b have been used in Nagari-Bengali, but in Sanskrit words the Sanskrit spelling (with or , as the case may be) has been kept intact. Similarly we have not interfered with the three sibilants , , , which are all pronounced as = sh in Bengali, in both Sanskrit and native Bengali words in the language.

A close phonetic transcription in a scientific script like that of the International Phonetic Association can alone give a correct representation of the Bengali pronunciation; and the Devanagari spelling as followed here, although an improvement in certain respects upon the current unhistorical Bengali orthography, will just give some idea of the Bengali habit of reading our common or pan-Indian script, in the Bengali style of writing it.

In the matter of the songs as transcribed under the musical notation for singing, a still greater phonetic approach to the actual Bengali pronunciation has become necessary. For example, the subscribed or, i.e. y or w after a consonant, is not pronounced as a distinct sound but it only doubles the preceding consonant (particularly in the middle of the word). And this doubling in pronunciation (and not the correct orthography with or ) has been taken note of in the transcription intented for singers.

It is hoped that these Devanagari editions of Rabindranath’s Bengali writings will serve the purpose of making the immortal words of the poet come nearer to the heart of the larger number of the Indian people; and the Visva-Bharati will consider this to be an effective way of partially paying our Rishi-rina, our cultural and spiritual debt to the Great Poet and Sage of Modern India and the Modern World.

Calcutta, March 1, 1957