in Portuguese and a Bengali prose dialogue with a Portuguese version of the original text. These are now fairly well known to students of Bengali language and literature. Crepar Xastrer Orthbhed or Compendio dos misterios de fee have been frequently referred to by many Bengali scholars and copious extracts from it as specimens of early Bengali prose, as it was written by a foreign student of the language, have been quoted by Prof. S. K. De in his Bengali Literature in the 19th Century and by Professors Suniti Kumar Chatterji and Priya Ranjan Sen in their edition of Manoel Da Assumpção’s grammar. There was a fairly large Christian community in the villages of Bhawal in the 17th century and it was urgently needed that missionaries well versed in the dialect of the district should minister to its spiritual needs. From a letter in the Cunha Rivara collection (Evora, Public Library) addressed by a Portuguese priest, Frei Alvaro da Costa, in 1682 to his friends at home, it appears that he found many Christians in Bengal, particularly in an island called Ramnacor (Ramnagar) but they had not seen a Padre for many years. Frei Manoel da Assumpção was Rector or Head of the Mission of the Saint Nicholas Tolentino in the province of Bengal in 1735 and things seem to have considerably improved in the meantime. It was for the benefit of the missionaries, who were expected to make new converts and to look after the moral and spiritual welfare of their flock that Frei Manoel compiled his grammar and vocabulary and the dialogue. Both of these works were dedicated to Dom Miguel de Tavora, Archbishop of Evora, and were printed simultaneously in 1743 at Lisbon by Francisco da Sylva, under the supervision of Frei George da Apresentação, who was probably an intimate friend and colleague of the author. The grammar and vocabulary seem to have received bnt scant attention at the time, for Diogo Barbosa Machado does not mention it in his Bibliotheca Lusitana published only nine years later. Nor does he give any detail about the life and occupation of
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