Brajabuli is not a natural language in the sense that nobody is a bom speaker of the language. A koine of artificial nature it acquitted a pan-North Indian lingua litteraria status due to its close connexion with the Vaisnava religion. The name of the language Brajabuli i.e. the buli or boli 'speech' of Brajabhumi i.e. of Braja the heartland of Radha-Krishna legend amply testifies to its religious association. Brajabuli is used in the composition of lyrics depicting the various emotional overtones of Radha Krishna's lila i.e. divine sport or amusement. This thematic concern with I' affaire du coeur has another aspect. Under the garb of divine emotions throbbing intense human emotions could be expressed and as a result the language unlike other artificial languages acquired an enervating intensity and as a literary medium Brajabuli, it should be noted, developed a diachronic dimension. It was cultivated till the closing decades of the 19th Century. Rabindranath Tagore was the last poet to compose love lyrics in Brajabuli. Literary History of Brajabuli has been exhaustively covered in Professor Sukumar Sen's monumental History of Brajabuli Literature (Calcutta University. 1935). A comprehensive linguistic study of Brajabuli is a desideratum. Dr. Mahidas Bhattacharya's thesis on the subject is welcome treatise in the field and its publication is significant on two counts: in many cases Ph.D dissertations are seldom published and as a result later researchers do not readily get any idea of what has been done and what remains to be done in the area and secondly Brajabuli has almost been a virgin field. Professor Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1926) has a few lines in his magnumopus and Professor Sukumar Sen wrote an article in Bengali in the 30s of the last century.
Interesting point about Brajabuli is that it is a literary koine showing an admixture of Bengali, Brajabhakha, Maithili, Oriya and Assamese. A Linguistic analysis of the corpus would throw light on the nature and degree of this linguistic alchemy and would also throw some light on the historical development of these languages. Dr. Bhattacharya has tried to do this under the rubric of phonology, morphology and syntax. These pages will reveal the hard labour put in by Dr. Bhattacharya in the preparation of the thesis as well as his analytical ability in the treatment of the subject. Dr. Bhattacharya needs to be congratulated and as his one time teacher and later as his research guide I heartily congratulate him for doing an excellent job. It is a pioneering work and it is in the fitness of things that this work is being printed under the aegis of International School of Dravidian Linguistics the Institution which is planned, shaped and nursed by the doyen of Linguistics in India the great V I. Personally I am indebted to Professor V. 1. Subramoniam for introducing Mahidas to the world of scholarship through this book which otherwise could not be printed so easily.
Brajabuli is a literary language of multiple origin and one of the highly prestigious literary expression in the History of Literature, cultivated in Bengal. From 14th to the 19th century it was used in literature specially in poetic form for musical purpose by different Vaisnava poets in Assam, Bihar, Bengal, Nepal and Orissa. From the analysis of Professor Suniti Kumar Chatterji & Dr. Sukumar Sen it is proved that this Lingua Litteraria, (Professor Sen has mentioned as 'Mischsprache') started to flourish in the Royal Court of Mithila and then adopted by the Vaisnava devotees in the said provinces during the time span already indicated. Chatterji & Sen commented on the materials of the language that it is specially a mixture of Maithili and Avahattha. But in the latter period the regional features of Assamese, Bengali & Oriya etc are assimilated sporadically due to the demand of poetry. The scholars like Hajari Prasad Dvivedi, Dr. Maheswara Neog, Artavallabha Mohanti etc have also introduced their new thoughts about the importance of Brajabuli in the study of NIA languages. Grier-son also mentioned the structural complexities of Vidyapati's songs. He wrote in the LSI, ".... it is now difficult to separate the genuine from the imitation, specially in the great collection of these songs which is accepted authority in Bengal, the former have become altered in the course of generations to suit the Bengali idiom and metre." (1903-1927: LSI Vol-III: 149). According to his opinion though Brajabuli emerged in a particular period of IA speeches, it did not flourish in the current of the evolution or development of OlA to NIA speeches because of the lack of its speaking competence. But its literary property demands an independent position in the series of NIA languages. Dr. Sen has opined that Brajabuli is not the dialect of any NIA language. It is a common property and the youngest standard speech of NIA. This study will give importance to these views and try to make a grammatical and linguistic survey of the language synchronically along with the diachronic description.
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