Bengali, or Bangla, carries more than a millennium of poetry, song, narrative, devotion, satire, drama, fiction, essay, journalism, and political speech across regions now divided chiefly between Bangladesh and India. Its literary history includes Buddhist songs, Hindu and Muslim narrative traditions, court and village performance, print modernity, reform, anticolonial struggle, partition, the Bengali Language Movement, liberation, migration, and radically different modernisms.

This shelf begins with Rabindranath Tagore's 103-poem English Gitanjali, a historical act of self-translation and international reception. It is not the Bengali book of the same title and does not count as Bengali original-language coverage. Begin with the introduction, choose a path through the reader's guide, and use the glossary for names, genres, and edition terms.