The Bhasha Odolan

Introduction
The Bhasha Odolan, the movement which compained for the use of Bengali in the domains of power in East Bengal and fought to make it one of the official language of the state, alongside the Urdu, was not merely, or even predominantly, a linguistic one. It was a political campaign of the greatest significance for the new state. It was, in fact, East Bengali’s first challenge to the hegemony of the Urdu speaking Bengali aristocracy (the Ashraf) and the West Pakistani ruling elite. The challengers were the vernacular proto elites, the modern educated Bengali speaking class and the largely middle class, and professionals and the students who aspired to join the middle class. The subtle social forces supported the movement from time

It is necessary to deal with them at some length. According to first census, that of 1872, Muslims formed 48 percent of the population of the province. Most of them were peasants, labors and artisans and the class as a whole was called the atrap (ajlaf). At the other end of the social hierarchy as mentioned earlier were the Muslims aristocrats and gentlemen called the ashraf.
The ashraf often spoke Urdu and official work during the Mughal period was carried on inn Persian. In fact so strong was feeling that Bengali culture was not the Muslims that Muttlib, a sixteenth century poet, believed that translating religious books in Bengali was sinful. This sin however was politically necessary because the ordinary Bengali Hindus were very close to their Hindus neighbors in most aspects of behavior. The Muslim elite attempted to reform and the used the Bengali language for the purpose. Out of the necessity of describing Islamic concepts and rituals, the Bengali of the Muslim writers was different from Hindu Bengali. It was Musalmani Bangle or Dobashi which is a ‘variety of Bengali which has a heavy admixture of words and some derivational affixes borrowed from the ‘‘Islamic’’ languages: Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Turkish’. The puthis written in Musalmani Bangle became increasingly Muslimized, i.e. took on Pro-Arabic honorifics and words. Thus, the Hindu honorific Sri was no longer used for God and the nasihat namas began to use Urdu titles. In short, Bengali was Islamized through the substitution of Sanskrit words by Pro-Arabic ones, i.e. by language planning that was ideologically