Bengali

The Department of Bengali is one of Visva-Bharati’s largest Departments, and it has played an important role in the university’s academic pursuits since its inception in 1951. From the very beginning of the establishment of Santiniketan Brahamavidyalaya in 1901, teaching and learning of the Bengali language and literature received a special emphasis in Santiniketan. Tagore himself, along with Pt. Kshitimohon Sen and Nityananda Binod Goswami were engaged in the process of teaching Bengali literature. The Department became a full-fledged one in 1951, when Visva-Bharati was christened as a Central University and an Institution of National importance. The abode of the Department was shifted from the centre of the Asrama to the present two adjacent buildings; the Vidya-Bhavana Angana in 2004, and the first floor of the Bhasha-Vidya Building in 2012-13. It came under the aegis of the Bhasha-Bhavana in 2009. The present faculty members of the Department retained the legacy set by its erstwhile luminous predecessors like Prof. Prabodh Chandra Sen, Bijanbehari Bhattacharya, Upendra Kumar Das, Ashokebejoy Raha, Panchanan Mandal, Satyendrnath Roy, Bhudeb Choudhuri, Bhabatosh Dutta, Somendranath Bandyopadhyay, Gopikanath Roychoudhury, Sukhomoy Mukhopadhyay, Pasupati Sasmal, Rambahal Tiwari, Sutapa Bhattacharya et al. Students and scholars from home and abroad opt for this Department for study and research. In the recent past, Tupur Gao, a student from China completed her MA in this Department; which must be regarded as a legacy of Tan Wen, alias Chameli Tan(the daughter of Tan-Yun-Shan, the founder of Cheena Bhavana) in the history of the Department.