Lexicographer Haricharan Bandyopadhyay passed away on this date. He was 92. He is best known for the five-volume Bangiya Sabdakosh he authored. It is regarded as one of the best Bengali dictionaries.
Born in Ramnarayanpur in 24-Parganas, he studied at local schools first, then went on to study at Metropolitan Institute in Calcutta, but had to discontinue his studies.
He began work in the Tagore estate in Patisar, which is in Bangladesh now.
Rabindranath Tagore met Bandyopadhyay at Patisar and was so impressed that he invited Bandyopadhyay to teach at Brahmacharya Ashram in Santiniketan. In 1905, Tagore requested Bandyopadhyay to start compiling a Bengali dictionary.
This became Bandyopadhyay’s mission for decades to come.
In a 1924 letter, Tagore talks about Bandyopadhyay having been at work on it for two decades and highly praises the effort. The dictionary began to be published in parts from 1932 and finally appeared in five volumes. Financing the project had been a problem.
The dictionary is outstanding in its scope, taking into account borrowed words from many languages, and also in the way Bandyopadhyay explains the etymology of Bengali words. It includes words from English, Portuguese, Hindi, other Indian languages, and also Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. Quotations are used from Bengali and Sanskrit texts to explain the origin of a word.
Bandyopadhyay wrote a few other books, on grammar and language and on Tagore. He received awards from Calcutta University and Deshikottama from Visva-Bharati.
