Portal:West Bengal/Selected biography/9
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Girish Chandra Sen (1836-1910), a Brahmo missionary, was the first person to translate the holy Qur’an into Bengali language in 1886. It was his finest contribution to Bengali literature. He learnt Persian and Sanskrit in early life. In 1869, Keshub Chunder Sen chose from amongst his missionaries, four persons and ordained them as adhyapaks or professors of four old religions of the world. He was selected to study Islam. A firm believer in the basic unity of all religions, he immersed himself in his studies and later went to Lucknow to study Arabic and the Islamic religious texts. After hard labour of six years from 1881-1886, he produced an annotated Bengali version of the holy Qur’an. In all he wrote and published 42 books, mainly related to Islam, in Bengali. Muslim society, in his days, respected him enormously and called him a Maulavi.
