If one is asked to name 27 foreign languages, one would find it a tall order. So what can you say about a man who knew 27 languages? Pramotha Nath Banerjee was such a man, and his magnum opus, A Polyglot Book of Proverbs — a comparative study in 27 — proved it.This year marks the birth centenary of Pramotha Babu, who was born on February 6, 1907, at Patna. He was the fourth son of an eminent scholar of English, Professor Jyotish Chandra Banerjee, who taught at Patna College and was himself a master of the English language. Like his father, Pramotha displayed a penchant for languages while still in his teens. In those days there was hardly any facility to learn foreign languages but he started learning them by himself. Even as a undergraduate, he began to contribute articles to various journals. This included a critical appreciation of Goethe, and translations from French, German and Persian poetry.Pramotha Babu came to Allahabad University several times. I met up with him on one such occasion, and I remember getting one nugget of useful information from him: he pointed out that the scientific convention is that smaller units are expressed in Latin and the higher ones in Greek. Deci (Latin) and deka (Greek) both mean ten. But when we write decimetre, it means one-tenth of a metre and when we write dekametre, it implies ten metres. This simple explanation of measurements was never given to us as schoolchildren.He also visited Allahabad University as an expert for the selection of teachers of German, French and Russian. In one such selection committee meeting, the other expert happened to be a German scholar. When Pramotha Babu conversed with him in perfect German, he wanted to know how many years the former had spent in Germany. Pramotha Babu replied that he had never visited Germany. Once he was invited by the French government to visit Paris. During his stay there, he delivered an impromptu talk on television in French. His command of the language led many to believe that he was actually a resident of France.Pramotha Babu’s mastery over 27 languages impressed Jawaharlal Nehru, too. When the ministry of defence started the School of Foreign Languages in 1948, Panditji appointed Pramotha Babu its founder director. He would invite the scholar often for breakfast conversations. He wrote widely on languages and I found two of his articles especially noteworthy. ‘Urdu hai jiska nam’ was an in-depth study of Urdu and its literature — and the contributions that Hindus have made to enrich it. Another entitled, ‘Calcutta-Tokyo language axis’, revealed the amazing structural and semantic affinities between Bengali and Japanese. His book of proverbs, too, is extremely interesting. It reveals the commonalities in structure and sense, size and style, among proverbs prevalent in different parts of the earth, including far-flung regions. This, he observed, pointed to the basic oneness of human beings.The writer is a professor at Allahabad University
