vaishnava faith of the Nuddea reformer Chaitanya which led to the
composition of the first Bengali prose.22 The Brahmans and the
Mohammedan rulers alike treated Bengali--though "it arose from the
tomb of the Sanskrit," as Italian did from Latin under Dante's
inspiration--as fit only for "demons and women." In the generation
before Carey there flourished at the same Oxford of India, as Nuddea
has been called, Raja Krishna Rai, who did for Bengali what our own
King Alfred accomplished for English prose. Moved, however, chiefly
by a zeal for Hindooism, which caused him to put a Soodra to death
for marrying into a Brahman family, he himself wrote the vernacular
and spent money in gifts, which "encouraged the people to study
Bengali with unusual diligence." But when, forty years after that,
Carey visited Nuddea he could not discover more than forty separate
works, all in manuscript, as the whole literature of 30,000,000 of
people up to that time. A press had been at work on the opposite
side of the river for fifteen years, but Halhed's grammar was still
the only as it was the most ancient printed book. One Baboo Ram,
from Upper India, was the first native who established a press in
Calcutta, and that only under the influence of Colebrooke, to print
the Sanskrit classics. The first Bengali who, on his own account,
printed works in the vernacular on trade principles, was Gunga
Kishore, whom Carey and Ward had trained at Serampore. He soon made
so large a fortune by his own press that three native rivals had
sprung up by 1820, when twenty-seven separate books, or 15,000
copies, had been sold to natives within ten years.

For nearly all these Serampore supplied the type. But all were in
another sense the result of Carey's action. His first edition of
the Bengali New Testament appeared in 1801, his Grammar in the same
year, and at the same time his Colloquies, or "dialogues intended to