Literary Career
Basu began his writing career in the 1920s. He adopted the pen name of Parashuram while writing humorous pieces for a monthly magazine. The name was not, apparently, an homage to the Parashurama of mythology. In fact, Basu simply borrowed the surname of someone at hand, the family goldsmith, Tarachand Parashuram. His first book of stories, Gaddalika, was published in 1924 and drew praise from such personalities as Rabindranath Tagore.
In 1937, when he published Chalantika, a monolingual Bengali dictionary, Rabindranath commented:
"At long last, we have a dictionary for Bengali. The concise grammar for Bengali that you have included in the appendix is also wonderful."
Chalantika also included Basu's first efforts to reform and rationalize Bengali orthography. A few years before its publication, in 1935, Calcutta University formed a committee, chaired by him, to formulate a set of guidelines governing the spelling of Bengali words. The recommendations of this committee were broadly accepted, and Chalantika is still in use today.
Read more about this topic: Rajshekhar Basu
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or career:
“When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)