Throughout his life Dr Muhammad Shahidullah contributed enormously to make Bengali language significant and meaningful. Enthusiastic in Bengali nationalism he not only discovered the root of Bengali language but also reformed its terms and terminology. His efforts were endless to enrich Bengali language to a height.
Very few scholars in this subcontinent has achieved a vast knowledge on different languages in the world. The hard earned knowledge of different languages made Shahidullah capable of enriching Bengali. His life-long devotion to enrich our language and literature has placed him on the highest echelon of honours.
His keen realization to cherish the spirit of mother tongue encourages us. He developed an endless spirit of linguistic nationalism. In the British India many learned pundits forgot their identity and took privileges in singing the supremacy of English in education, culture and livelihoods.
Not only in British India, even after the partition of Bengal in 1947,the existence of Bengali language was at risk at the hands of Pakistani rulers. They were involved in deep conspiracy to snatch away the rights of the Bengalis to speak Bangla. Very few Bengali scholars and researchers worked against the usual tide to enrich our language and culture. Certainly, Dr Muhammad Shahidullah is a glaring spirit amid those.
At the very beginning of his schooling he showed his indomitable spirit and scholarship. He learnt Urdu and Persian for his family's sake and a few other languages such as Sanskrit, English and Hindi for academic purposes during his boyhood. Not only that, throughout his life he developed an outstanding skill over more than 18 languages in the world, which corresponds his inborn quality bringing fame and name from national to global arena.
Muhammad Shahidullah was an internationally renowned educationist, writer and philologist. He was born on July 10, 1885 in the village Peyara, Chobbish Pargana, West Bengal (now in India). His father, Mafizuddin Ahmad, was a warden at the shrine of PirGorachand.But Shahidullah did not have any attraction to be an inheriting of his father, rather he showed much interest to achieve secular knowledge to serve the humanity in different ways.
Qualified in Entrance examination in 1904 from Howrah Zila School and FA in 1906 from Presidency College, Calcutta with distinction, Dr.Muhammad Shahidullah took admission at Hooghly College in the department of Sanskrit. But he fell ill and gave up studies for two years. Then he completed Honors degree from Calcutta City College.
In pursuing Masters in Sanskrit he got himself enrolled at Calcutta University but his dream to study Sanskrit shattered as the orthodox Hindu pundits of the university refused to teach him Sanskrit as he was a Muslim student.
It is evidenced that Calcutta University faced huge criticism from the east and the west upon this refusal of Dr Muhammad Shahidullah. Dailies of the time published news on Shahidullah affair. Amid huge criticism on Shahidulla affair, AshutoshMukherjje, Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University opened Philology department for the newly enrolled student Muhamad Shahidullah and he was the first student completed MA in Comparative Philology .
Though for the first time he was denied of studying Sanskrit, later he found scopes to study Sanskrit as Sanskrit and Bengali were two languages among many more hunted him passionately throughout his life. After his MA in Philology he completed LLB and started practicing at Basirhat Bar Council for some years.
But with the invitation of AshutoshMukherjie he joined Calcutta University as a research associate of Denesh Chandra Sen. In 1921 when Dhaka University was founded, he joined as a lecturer in the department of Sanskrit and Bengali.
After serving a couple of years,taking academic leave, he attended the Sorbonne University in Paris from where he obtained D Phil degree in 1928. He was the first Indian Muslim to receive the doctorate degree. He was also the first student in Asia to obtain a diploma for his fundamental research in phonetics from the University of Paris the same year.
After returning Dhaka University he got himself engaged in research activities on Bengali language and literature. This time,based on discovering the root of Bengali language he wrote the first Bengali grammar in Bangla language. Apart from this, in one of his thesis, he showed that Bengali as language originated from Gaudi or MagdhiPrakrt.
In 1937 when the university authority separated Bengali and Sanskrit as individual departments, Dr Shahidullah became the chairman of Bengali department.
His researches not only enriched Bengali language, literature and culture but also developed a linguistic nationalism. He played an important role in the language movement. He was the first to establish the reasons why Bangla, instead of Urdu, should be the state language of Pakistan. Not only that, he set some arguments taking examples from other countries in favour of using more than one language to save the existence of Bengali language which was being threatened at the hands of the west Pakistan rulers.
He was bold enough to say that it would be a great mistake if Pakistan chose only Urdu discarding Bengali, the language of the majority people.
It is obvious that the nation is indebted to Dr Muhammad Shahidullah for his outstanding contributions in the field of Bengali language and literature. He is our national pride. His thoughts and philosophy continue awakening the Bengali nation with knowledge and enlightenment throughout the ages.
Writer is teacher at Prime Universityand a research scholar at the IBS
