THE year 1867 will not only be remembered for Hindi-Urdu controversy, but it will also go down in history as a year that marked yet another linguistic conflict: the Oriya-Bengali controversy.

Odia, also spelt Oriya and Uriya, is an Indo-Aryan language, just like Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and many other languages of the subcontinent but, comparatively, Odia has been less influenced by Arabic and Persian.

Chiefly spoken in Odisha, also spelt Orissa, Odia and its varieties are also spoken in West Bengal and some adjoining Indian states. In 1867, a Bengali scholar announced that Oriya was just a dialect of Bengali. A booklet published in the same year stressed the British India government to convert Oriya-language schools into Bengali-language ones. Orissa did not need any separate language, it said, as the Oriya-speaking population consisted of only two million people.

John Beames, a scholar and a civil servantin the British India government, had served in various parts of the area that was bacl( then often referred to as `Lower Bengal` and where these two languages were spoken. He had lived in Odisha for quite some time and later on recalled the period in his memoirs quite fondly. Beames had studied Sanskrit and Persian at college and was profoundly interested in philology. He also knew Bengali quite well, so he examined both the languages minutely and was convinced that Odia or Oriya was an independent language different from Bengali.

Referring to the controversy, Beames wrote in the first volume of his A Comparative Grammar of Modern Aryan Languages of India: `Much of this chain of arguments is purely political and may therefore be very briefly dismissed by the following remarks.

If Oriya is to be suppressed because it is only spoken by a few millions of people, it might also be urged that Dutch, or Danish, or Portuguese should be obliterated also` (London, 1872, page 117-118, available online at https://archive.org). This work ofJohn Beames, published in three volumes between 1872 and 1879, discussing some local languages that include Hindi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya and Bengali, gave him much recognition.

Much of the information available about John Beames and his life is derived from two sources: G. A. Grierson`s brief article that he had published in The Journal of the Asiatic Society`s 1902 issue after Beames` death and even a briefer account by C.E Buckland as given in his Dictionary of Indian Biography.

According to Grierson and Buckland, John William Beames was born at a Greenwich Hospital on June 21, 1837. He was educated at Haileybury College during the years 185657. Beames went to India in 1858 and served Indian Civil Service in Punjab from 1859 till 1861.

Beames was then employed in Bengal Presidency, becoming collector and holding some other important posts. A scholar of language, literature and history, Beams contributed to The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, Journal of the AsiaticSociety and The Indian Antiquity: A Journal of Oriental Research.

He also edited Sir Henry Elliot`s SupplementalGlossaryofIndianTerms(1869).

Beams learned the native languages during his stay in the subcontinent. In the words of Grierson, `to him were equally familiar, from practical contact with the village peopie who spoke them, the rough patois of the Jats of Punjab, the smooth-flowing Oriya, the clipped dialect of a Bengali peasant and the clear-cut, practical Bhojpuri of Bihar`.

Beames` book Outlines of Indian Philology (1867) was more important in his own time than today as now linguistics has made giant strides and new research has expanded our 1(nowledge on the science of language, but it was one of the earliest works on the languages spoken in the subcontinent, including Urdu and Hindi.

Ehtisham Husain translated it into Urdu and published it under the title Hindustani Lisaniyaat Ka Khaka (1948). Taking into account the changes that Beames had made in the second edition (1868), EhtishamHusain annotated the work and penned an intro.

Among the takeaways from the book one is that Beames said Urdu was truly the lingua franca of the subcontinent, albeit he occasionally calls it Hindustani. He says, while discussing use of Bengali and Urdu in certain areas of Lower Bengal as a contact language among speakers of different languages, it is `another instance of the strong tendency of Hindustani [read: Urdu] to supply the place of a lingua franca in all parts of India`. Before him, John Gilchrist (1759-1841) had expressed similar a view about Urdu.

John Beames` other works include Grammar of the Bengali Language (1891), posthumously published Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian and a large number of research papers. He played a pivotal role in the survival of the Odia language and is revered in Odisha till today.

John William Beames died on May 24, 1902, in Clevedon, Somerset.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com