translations. The province, or lieutenant-governorship then had the
same area as France, and contained more than double its population,
or eighty millions. Of the three principal vernaculars, Bengali is
spoken by forty-five millions of Hindoos and Mohammedans. It was
for all the natives of Bengal and of India north of the Dekhan
("south") tableland, but especially for the Bengali-speaking people,
that William Carey created a literary language a century ago.

The first Bengali version of the whole New Testament Carey
translated from the original Greek before the close of 1796. The
only English commentary used was the Family Expositor of Doddridge,
published in 1738, and then the most critical in the language. Four
times he revised the manuscript, with a Greek concordance in his
hand, and he used it not only with Ram Basu by his side, the most
accomplished of early Bengali scholars, but with the natives around
him of all classes. By 1800 Ward had arrived as printer, the press
was perfected at Serampore, and the result of seven years of toil
appeared in February 1801, in the first edition of 2000 copies,
costing £612. The printing occupied nine months. The type was set
up by Ward and Carey's son Felix with their own hands; "for about a
month at first we had a Brahman compositor, but we were quite weary
of him. We kept four pressmen constantly employed." A public
subscription had been opened for the whole Bengali Bible at Rs. 32,
or £4 a copy as exchange then was, and nearly fifty copies had been
at once subscribed for. It was this edition which immediately led
to Carey's appointment to the College of Fort William, and it was
that appointment which placed Carey in a position, philological and
financial, to give the Bible to the peoples of the farther East in
their own tongue.