In the twentieth century, the development of Bengali literature rivalled with Urdu and Hindi. The distribution of this literature was facilitated by the establishment of the Baptist Mission Press at Serampore, Bengal by the Englishman, William Carey in 1800.
Carey was also responsible for writing a book about the grammar of Bengali and also published an English-Bengali dictionary. His press inspired wealthy local Bengalis to open their own press and disseminate literature in Bengali. Although a lot of ancient and medieval literature in Bengali like the Mangal Kavyas existed, before the nineteenth century it had not been widely published.
It was with the nationalist fervour reaching Bengal that the literature took a definite turn towards the concerns of the common man’s suffering and the nation’s plight under the British rule. Raja Ram Mohan Roy was amongst the first to write in Bengali and English and his work was read widely. His contemporary writers were Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Akshay Kumar Dutta. But the zenith of nationalist Bengali literature was achieved by the writing of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. His work Anand Math was hugely popular, so much so that Vande Mataram, our national song, is an excerpt taken from this novel.
The first Indian to win a Nobel Prize was also a writer in Bengali, Rabindranath Tagore. He got this award for his Bengali masterpiece Geetanjali in 1913. Sharat Chandra Chatterjee, Qazi Nazrul Islam and R. C Dutta made important contributions to Bengali literature.
In the medieval period, Assamese literature was dominated by buranjis (court chronicles). Apart from these official works, Shankardev composed devotional poetry in Assamese. In the context of the modern Assamese literature, two major scholars namely Padmanaba Gohain Barua and Lakshmi Nath Bezbarua, have made their mark.
From the east of India, a sizeable corpus comes from Odia literature.
The first work came from Sarala Das. In the Medieval period, one of the outstanding writers was Upendra Bhanja who wrote in 1700.
In the modern period, Radha Nath Ray and Fakirmohan Senapati have made their mark with the nationalistic tenor to their work.