The Bahu of Bengal: Bengali and Devanagari scripts

And here are more graphics of Bengali and Devanagari scripts compared, complete with transliteration or romanization using the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST). See The Bahu of Bengal: Bengali and Devanagari scripts ('via Blog this'):

Vowels

Consonants

Sibilants

I am taking the online course Introduction to Sanskrit offered by the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.  Here are a couple of tools that I use to augment my study:

Google Input Tools. (n.d.). Retrieved May 24, 2018, from https://www.google.com/inputtools/

Google Input Tools makes it easy to type in the language you choose. I installed language packs for Sanskrit and Bengali , which I used to create the graphics above.

Transliteration Tool. (n.d.). Retrieved May 24, 2018, from https://www.ashtangayoga.info/sanskrit/transliteration/transliteration-tool/

The Transliteration Tool enables you to enter text in Devanagari and transliterate it into IAST. I use it to cross-check my homework.

Bengali and Devanagari scripts

I think that if I look at these diagrams often enough, I'll learn the Bengali script ☺

While we are talking about scripts, check out Indian Type Foundry (ITF). ITF designs and distributes retail and custom Unicode-compliant digital fonts for both Indian and global markets. Unicode enables people around the world to use computers in different languages. Freely-available Unicode specifications and data form enable software internationalization in major operating systems, search engines, applications, and the Web.

Bengali patas

Last Thursday, my husband and I went to an extraordinarily well-attended talk on and exhibit of Bengali patas at the Gandhi Memorial Center in Washington, DC. Patas, a Bengali folk art form, are hand-painted scrolls that illustrate stories.

Patuas roam from village to village to tell stories as they unroll the scrolls vertically (story panels go from top to bottom). Sadly, they are too often regarded as beggars (to understand, read this analogous story about kalamkari artists). The art of pata is local to the districts of Midnapore and Birbhum.

For us, no trip to India is complete without a visit to Birbhum, the home of Tagore's Shantinekitan, but this was our first exposure to pata. We are more accustomed to seeing batiks and terracotta objects in the stalls on the road between Shantiketan and Bolpur, the nearest train station.


Panel of a Bengali pat
Jetayu tells Ram about Sita's abduction

Many of the traditional Bengali patas cover episodes from the Ramayana. Natural disasters, such as floods, cyclones, and even the freak tornado are also covered. More recently, pats address social issues such as the status of women and AIDS: in fact, NGOs have commissioned patuas to create patas on social issues.

The pats that were exhibited at the Gandhi Memorial Center belong to Dr. Geraldine Forbes, a professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego. Dr. Forbes has traveled through Bengali villages collecting patas for 30 years.

Anuranan

Rahul Bose as Rahul and Raima Sen as Preeti in Anuranan

It's not often that one finds Bengali language films playing in movie theaters in the U.S. (unless it's a retrospective of the films of Satyajit Ray), so on a lark, I persuaded my husband to take me to see Anuranan.

Anuranan is about two couples: the dreamy/poetic Rahul (Rahul Bose) and his wife Nandita (Rituparna Sengupta) and driven businessman/domineering husband Amit (Rajat Kapoor) and his repressed wife Preeti (played by Raima Sen, granddaughter of Bengali cinema legend Souchitra Sen). Gradually, Preeti finds that she can find expression for her interests in literature and nature with Rahul. The relationship has tragic consequences.

As with many Bengali offerings, Anuranan is replete with quotations of songs and poems of Tagore. In the way that Anuranan deals with a woman who finds (non-sexual) self-expression through a man other than her husband, it recalls Satyajit Ray's films Charulata and Ghare-Baire, both based on stories by Tagore.