শ্রীশচন্দ্র বসু ও বাংলার অনুবাদে সভাপতি| Sris Candra Basu and Sabhapati's Bengali

Abstract

This short article introduces, for the first time in published scholarship in Bengali or English, the only known Bengali-language translation of Sabhapati's Om. A Treatise on Vedanta and Raj Yoga (1880). Sabhapati had first delivered these lectures in Lahore, and they were edited by Sris Candra Basu, who also published their Bengali translation Bedantadarsan Rajveg (1885), a copy of which is held at the National Library of India in Kolkata. The translator, however, was not S.C Basu but one Ambikacaran Bandyopadhyay, a resident of Kolkata. In this article I therefore note the way Ambikacaran in his new introduction reframes Sabhapati's philosophy in the context of western science and philosophy, bhakti yoga, jnana yoga, and other categories of knowledge that would be more well-known to an educated Bengali audience. I then demonstrate an example as to how Ambikacaran refashioned Sabhapati's English poems, likely themselves heavily edited by S.C. Basu, into Bengali songs complete with a functional meter and thyming scheme in Bengali. After examining some of the vocabulary in these songs and gesturing toward their possible relation to extant Bengali folk songs, I thenanalyze how the English caption to Sabhapati's primary diagram of the yogic body and the cakras possibly the first such diagram printed in Bengal, decades before John Woodroffe's The Serpent Power was translated into Bengali, with special attention to the rendering of "lingasarir" as "suksmasatir."