A yellow taxi drives along a street in Kolkata decorated with colourful Bengali messages painted on the asphalt for International Mother Language Day 2025. The messages are written in white and red paint, surrounded by other road markings. Other vehicles are visible in the background, and the roadside is lined with trees and a blue railing adorned with colourful flags.

Bengali messages on a Kolkata road to mark International Mother Language Day in 2025. Shabdakalpa, a comprehensive digital database of Bengali words, will offer unprecedented access to archives of the Bengali language.IMAGO / Pacific Press Agency

The making of Shabdakalpa, a pioneering historical dictionary of Bengali

The ambitious Shabdakalpa project, launching in 2028, aims to map the history of every Bengali word in digital form, preserving cultural memory and inspiring future Southasian language initiatives

Ankush Pal is a sociologist currently pursuing his graduate studies at the London School of Economics, where he is researching public space, Southasian culture and urbanisation

Published on:

22 Aug 2025, 6:49 am

IT WAS A MUGGY Kolkata afternoon in 2017 when the first lines of code for Shabdakalpa were carefully entered into a lab computer at Jadavpur University in West Bengal. In the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR), established at the university in 2003, Sukanta Chaudhuri and his team huddled over scruffy printouts of 19th-century Bengali-language newspapers and digital scans of medieval manuscripts. In retrospect, the moment seems almost prophetic: by linking centuries of Bengali texts, the team planted the seeds of an ambitious and enduring project.

With Chaudhuri, the founding director of SCTR and the head of the Shabdakalpa project, at the helm, and supported by scholars like Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta and Abhijit Gupta, the team embarked on an audacious journey to map every Bengali word through time, in a comprehensive digital database.

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India

language

Bengal