Deopara Prashasti (Deopara Inscription), The Sena Dynasty's Patronization of Bengali Language

 Deopara Prashasti (Deopara Inscription):

 Deopara prasti is an important scriptural source of ancient Bengal. The script contains some highly appreciative verses that shed significant light on the history of the Sen dynasty, especially Vijayasen. Umapatidhar, a famous Sanskrit poet of the Sen era and minister of Lakshmansen, has written this book.

 The inscription on a stone piece is 5 km from Rajshahi district town. C.T. Metcalf was discovered in 1865 from a village called Deopara under Godagadi police station in the west. Excavations led by Kumar Sarat Kumar Roy of Dighapatia in the vicinity of the site of the script have led to the discovery of a wide area, where there are rocky artifacts, old Dighis(Big Ponds), and ruins of ancient houses (e.g. the majestic Pradyumneshwar temple). The present script can be seen on the banks of a large dighi known as Paduswara. Vijaypur, which is mentioned as the capital of the Sen kings in Dhoyi's Pawandoot Kavya, is identified by the scholars as identical to the village of Vijayanagar, located south of Deopara village.

 Metcalfe was the first to publish the inscription in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Number 34, Part-1). Later, in the first volume of Epigraphia Indica, Professor Kilhorn edited the script with a view of criticism. The script has 32 lines of equal length. The stone on which the script is engraved is 0.97 m/ 0.6 m in length-width, but the amount of the inscribed part is 0.82 m / 0.45 m. The size of the character is approximately 3/8́́. The engraving carving completes its work with wonderful skill and deep care. The inscription mentions the reign of King Vijayasen and the genealogy of the Sen kings of Bengal. In verses 5-9, the Sens originate from the Karnat of South India and are described as Brahmakshatriya.

 Verses 14-22 Vijayasen is portrayed as a great king or famous king of ancient times. All these verses say that Vijayasen Nanny, Veer, Raghava, Vardhan imprisoned the kings and defeated Gaur, Kamrup, and Kalingaraj. He also sent a naval expedition along the course of the Ganges to defeat the kings of the West ('Western Circle'). Vijayasen built a high-quality and majestic temple of Pradyumneshwar and excavated a dighi (verse no. 22-29) near it. The script then describes an idol installed inside the temple (verse no. 30-31) and finally, there is the identity of umapatidhar and engraver, the author of the book. The entire script contains 36 verses composed in a variety of rhythms such as Vasanttilak, Shardul biritrit, Surgdhara, Prithvi, Mandakranta, Malini, Shikharini, Indrabajra, and tribals.

 The letters used in the script are very similar to the original Bengali characters. Rakhaldas Banerjee, who studied the letters of the Deopara prescription, has clearly shown that at this time, the morphological development was completed in about 22 cases of the Bengali alphabet. For this reason, the Deopara amplitude can be called the precursor of the modern Bengali alphabet. It is true that in the Deopara Prasti, a highly admirable account of the Sen king, especially Vijayasen, has been recorded. But this tone of praise certainly proves that Bengal achieved a glorious place in history under Bijoysen.

References:

1.       Aksadul Alam (2012), "Deopara Prashasti", in Sirajul Islam; Ahmed A. Jamal (eds.), Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (Second ed.), Asiatic Society of Bangladesh

2.      Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay (1919), The Origin of the Bengali Script, University of Calcutta available in Wikimedia Commons

Franz Kafka - Kafkaesque

Franz Kafka is considered one of the greatest literary figures in recent history. He is known for his extraordinarily dark, disorienting and surreal writing style. 

A style and quality so unique to him that everything resembling him has become known and referred to as Kafkaesque. Understanding his writing and Kafkia's qualities, it helps to understand his youth. Kafka was born in Prague in 1883. His father was named Herman and his mother was named Julie. His father was a wealthy and successful businessman who, thanks to his pure will and a brash and aggressive personality, managed to come out of the working class, start a successful business, marry a well-educated woman and become member of the upper middle class. class society. As parents tend to do, Herman hoped for a child who would live up to his ideal stature in person. Franz Kafka was not that. Franz was born an anxious and sickly little child. And above all it stayed like that.Therefore, through no fault of his own, Franz would become a great source of disappointment for his father and a sort of psychological punching bag for him as he attempted to mold Franz into what he wanted to be but could never be. In his teens, Franz developed the urge to write to cope with his growing feelings of anxiety, guilt and self-hatred. Understandably, his father did not allow him to devote himself to writing and ultimately set the limits for Kafka's life, forcing him to pursue law as a profession instead. While studying law at university, Kafka continued to write and met one of his only true friends, Max Brod, another writer who would eventually persuade Kafka to publish his first 3 collections of works. However, these pieces sold very poorly and mostly went unnoticed. After college, Kafka worked in a law firm, then for an insurance company. Here, Kafka would become subjected to long hours, unpaid overtime, enormous amounts of paperwork, and absurd and complex bureaucratic systems. Kafka was understandably unhappy. While working for the insurance company, Kafka continued to write on the sidelines, creating some of his most notable works including The Trial, The Castle and Amerika. However, he made no attempt to publish any of them at the time and also left much of his work unfinished, believing it to be unworthy.Kafka continued to work for the insurance company for most of his  short life, while writing about his work schedule. In 1924, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 41.

He never published his writings again, and he never received personal success or recognition for the small sum he made. He died believing  his job was no good. On his deathbed, he even instructed Max Brod to burn all  his unpublished manuscripts after his death. Obviously, Brod did not honor Kafka's wish. Here we are about 100 years later, talking about him. After Kafka's death, Brod spent the next year  working to organize and publish his notes and manuscripts. Over the next decade, Kafka would become one of the most prominent literary and philosophical figures of the twentieth century. In different words, one of the finest writers and thinkers of the century lived his existence together along with his writings buried in a drawer; conscious, oblivious, or detached to being seated on a number of the maximum vital works in the latest history. He lived in  his father's eyes; insufficient disappointment. Yet, in the eyes of history, he is an extremely important individual. One can only wonder how many individuals like Kafka have and continue to walk this earth completely disconnected or limited in seeing who they  are or could be. How many Kafkas have lived and died never sharing their voice with the world, whose voice would change her forever? How many people never know who they will be after they are gone? Luckily for everyone but Kafka, his work was saved and a whole new type of thinking and writing developed in his name; Kafkaesque. In general, the term Kafkaesque tends to refer to the bureaucratic nature of the capitalist, judicial and governmental systems. The kind of complex, unclear processes where no  individual ever really has a full understanding of what's going on and the system doesn't really matter. But the quality of the Kafkaesque  seems to extend much further. It is not necessarily exemplified simply by what these systems are, but rather by the reaction of the individuals who are subjected to them; and what it might represent.In one of his most famous novels, The Trial, one morning the protagonist, Joseph Kay, is suddenly arrested at his home. absurd process in which nothing is really explained or made a lot of sense. The process is riddled with corruption and disorder, and at the end of the novel, after h