Bangla / Bengali

Two English names for বাংলা and its language field. “Bangla” is widely used by speakers and institutions; “Bengali” remains common in English. Neither name should imply one state, religion, or ethnicity owns every work in the language.

Bengal

A historical and cultural region now divided chiefly between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, with important adjoining and diasporic histories. It is not identical to any single present political unit.

Bengali-language literature

Writing and oral-linked literature in Bengali. This differs from “literature by Bengali people,” which may be written in English, Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Santali, or other languages.

Charyapada

A collection of esoteric Buddhist songs associated with siddha poets and often placed near the beginning of Bengali literary history. Its language belongs to a shared, disputed early eastern Indo-Aryan field; it should not be claimed exclusively without philological explanation.

Mangalkavya

Long Bengali narrative poems celebrating and establishing the power of particular deities, surviving through multiple authors, cycles, recensions, and performance histories.

Manasamangal

The Mangalkavya cycle concerning the snake goddess Manasa. It is a family of textual and performed versions, not one stable anonymous book.

Vaishnava padavali

Lyric song traditions centered especially on Radha and Krishna, devotion, separation, longing, and performance. Individual poets, languages, ragas, and manuscript or print editions must be named.

Brajabuli

A literary language associated with Vaishnava lyric, shaped through Maithili and Bengali literary practice. Tagore later used it for his Bhanusingha poems.

Puthi

A manuscript or printed-book term used especially for popular Bengali narrative, religious, and didactic works. “Puthi literature” covers diverse texts and communities, not a single genre of folklore.

Kissa

Story or romance tradition drawing strongly on Arabic and Persian narrative materials in Bengali adaptation and performance. It is central to Muslim Bengali literary history.

Baul

Singer-practitioner traditions associated with embodied spiritual song across religious boundaries. Baul should not be used as a generic word for every Bengali folk singer.

Sadhu bhasha

A highly Sanskritized formal literary register of Bengali historically prominent in prose. Its relation to speech and to later colloquial standards changed over time.

Cholit bhasha

Colloquial-based literary Bengali whose adoption transformed modern prose. “Colloquial” does not mean a transparent copy of one everyday dialect.

Rabindra Sangeet

The large song repertory composed by Rabindranath Tagore, in which text, melody, rhythm, performance, and authorized variants matter together. A printed poem alone may not represent the full song object.

Nazrul Sangeet

Songs composed by Kazi Nazrul Islam across devotional, romantic, revolutionary, classical, folk-linked, Hindu, and Muslim vocabularies and musical forms.

Gitāñjali / Gitanjali

Literally “song offerings.” The name refers to Tagore's 1910 Bengali poetry collection and, in English contexts, to the distinct 103-poem Song Offerings assembled through his self-translation from several Bengali books. The two must not be treated as textually identical.

Self-translation

An author rendering or recreating their own work in another language. It retains authorial agency but may involve selection, omission, condensation, combination, and new composition. It is still translation history, not automatic equivalence.

Song Offerings

The English subtitle of the 103-poem Gitanjali collection. On this shelf it names the historical English reader work, not Bengali original-language coverage.

W. B. Yeats introduction

The essay accompanying the English Gitanjali. It is valuable evidence for reception and literary networks, but its claims about India and spiritual simplicity require critical reading.

Brahmo Samaj

A nineteenth-century religious and reform movement important to Tagore's family and intellectual world. It should not be used as a complete doctrinal key to every Tagore poem.

Bengal Renaissance

A common name for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual, literary, artistic, scientific, and reform movements. The term can overcenter elite Hindu Kolkata and a European model of “renaissance”; specify the people and institutions meant.

Partition of Bengal (1905)

The British colonial division of Bengal, annulled in 1911, which intensified political and cultural movements. It differs from the 1947 partition.

Partition (1947)

The division of British India and Bengal, producing India and Pakistan and making East Bengal part of Pakistan. It brought violence, displacement, refugee histories, and divided literary institutions.

East Bengal / East Pakistan

Names for the eastern part of divided Bengal in different periods. East Bengal became East Pakistan and, after the 1971 war, Bangladesh.

Bengali Language Movement

The movement in East Pakistan opposing the imposition of Urdu as the sole state language and demanding recognition for Bangla. The deaths of demonstrators on 21 February 1952 became central to cultural and political memory.

International Mother Language Day

Observed on 21 February through a Bangladesh initiative recognized by UNESCO. It carries the memory of the Language Movement into a worldwide language-rights frame.

Bangladesh Liberation War

The 1971 war through which Bangladesh became independent. Literature engages liberation, genocide, displacement, gendered violence, memory, and the later politics of commemoration.

Little magazine

Small, often independent periodicals central to Bengali modernism, experiment, criticism, and political writing. A book-only canon misses much of their work.

Dalit Bengali literature

Writing that confronts caste oppression and speaks from Dalit social and literary histories. It should not be absorbed into a generalized class or refugee category.

Adivasi / Indigenous relation

A relational term for Indigenous peoples and communities. Bengali writing about Adivasi life is not identical to literature authored in Santali or other Indigenous languages; the canon map must connect without annexing.

Original-language coverage

A public Bengali text preserving direct language access. Without a lawful reader translation it is counted as source-language-only, not full reader coverage.

Historical reader translation

A public-domain or openly licensed translation useful for reading but carrying the language, scholarship, omissions, and assumptions of its own time.