Remembering the Man of Letters

Doctor Mohammad Shahidullah was a man of letters. He was an eminent linguist of this sub-continent. He mastered many languages. He was called a    moving /mobile dictionary. He had infinite interest in learning . H was a very  pious man. Muhammad Shahidullah was a famous Bengali educationist,  philogist. linguist, writer and religious scholar, Venerated as Gyantaposh,  Shahidullah conducted fundamental research on the origin of Bengali language.  Muhammad shahidullah was born in village Peyara, West Bengal, India on 10th july, 1885. His father Mofizuddin was a warden of a religious shrine. During his school life shahidullah learnt to  speak, read and write in    Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and English fluently.  Muhammad Shahidullah joined the University of Dhaka on 1921 as a lecturer of Bengali and Sanskrit. Shahidullah studied Vedicsanskrit, Buddhist Sanskrit, Tibetan and ancient Persian language at Freiburg University in Germany. Shahidullah received his doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1928 for his research on the dialects of  Charyapada. He was the first Indian Muslim to receive the  Doctorate degree. Shahidullah completed his graduation on Sanskrit and obtained Master degree on comparative philology from the University of Calcutta. In 1937 he became the head of Bangla department of the University of Dhaka. Shahidullah first established the reasons why Bengali should be the state language of Pakistan. He was also a great collector of folk literature and worked under Dinesh Chandra Sen. He is the pride of our country.