Historic show to unveil 250-year-old hand-carved wooden blocks

Nearly 220 years after his death, the invaluable work of Panchanan Karmakar, including hundreds of the first 'harafs' or blocks he etched that led to the first-ever book in Bengali and subsequently gave the world a manual to learn the language, will be opened up in an iconic show by his great-great-granddaughter Priyanka Mullick

- OUR CORRESPONDENT

In a historic first, the wooden blocks - hand carved and as tiny as a centimetre in size that gave the world the Bengali language in printed form - will be brought out for public viewing this January.

Nearly 220 years after his death, the invaluable work of Panchanan Karmakar, the man called the Father of Bengali typography, including hundreds of the first 'harafs' or blocks he etched that led to the first-ever book in Bengali and subsequently gave the world a manual to learn the language, will be opened up in an iconic show by his great-great-granddaughter Priyanka Mullick.

Karmakar passed away in 1804 at the age of 54. Kept invisibly for over two hundred years in his house in Serampore, the original machines were used to develop the first-ever typeface for print in Bengali.

The wooden Bengali alphabet and typeface developed by Karmakar were used until Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar created a simpler version in later years.

An English typographer and Orientalist who supervised Karmakar's work was Charles Wilkin. He was also the first translator of the 'Bhagavad Gita' into English and introduced the term 'Hinduism'. Interestingly, Karmakar later developed typefaces in more than 40 other languages including Indian, Arabic, Persian, Burmese, Japanese and Chinese.

Karmakar's work enabled the printing of the first-ever book in Bengali, 'The Grammar of Bengal Language', by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. It also enabled the printing of Bengal's first newspaper, 'Samachar Darpan'. The advent of the typeface also birthed several local press and newspapers which became the voice of the common people in Bengal and later contributed politically.

Karmakar also developed the first 'Nagari' type in India to print William Carey's Sanskrit grammar.

With Karmakar's help, the 'Serampore Mission' established a foundry for making type, which eventually became Asia's largest type foundry.