What language is spoken by Bengali Hindus?
28003496#0
Bengali Hindus () are an ethnic, linguistic, and religious population who make up the majority in the Indian state of West Bengal and Tripura. In Bangladesh they form the largest minority. They are Bengalis adherents of Hinduism, and are native to the Bengal region in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent. Bengali Hindus speak Bengali, which belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family and adhere to the Shakta and Vaishnava traditions of their native religion, Hinduism. There are significant numbers of Bengali-speaking Hindus in different Indian states.
Bengali Hindus
28003496#1
Around the 8th century, the Bengali language branched off from Magadhi Prakrit, a derivative of Sanskrit that was prevalent in the eastern region of the Indian Subcontinent at that time. During the Sena period (11th – 12th century) the Bengali culture developed into a distinct culture within the Hindu civilisation. Bengali Hindus were at the forefront of the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th century. The Bengal region was noted for its participation in struggle for the independence from the British rule. At the time of independence of India in 1947, the province of Bengal was partitioned between India and East Pakistan, part of the Muslim-majority state of Pakistan. Millions of Bengali Hindus migrated from East Bengal (later Bangladesh) and settled in West Bengal and other states of India. The migration continued in waves through the fifties and sixties, especially during the 1950 East Pakistan genocide and the 1964 East-Pakistan riots. In 1971, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, an estimated 2.4 million Bengali Hindus were massacred by the Pakistani army. Estimates for the total number of people killed by Pakistan Army range from 300,000 to 3,000,000.
The Hindus are a religious group, native to the Indian subcontinent, speaking a broad range of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and adhering to the native belief systems, rooted in the Vedas. The word Hindu is popularly believed to be a Persian exonym for the people native to the Indian subcontinent. The word is derived from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name for the river Indus and it initially referred to the people residing to the east of the river. The Hindus are constituted into various ethno-linguistic subgroups, which in spite of being culturally diverse, share a common bond of unity.
Bengali Hindus