ABSTRACT
The tradition of translingual writing (writing in a language other than the mother tongue) has always been noticeable among the Bengali-speaking people, who make up the fifth largest linguistic community in the world, and now live in India and Bangladesh. Since their colonization by the British they have developed a robust tradition of anglophone translingualism in all major literary genres. Poetry was the dominant genre in the colonial era, but with decolonization prose literature took the lead, and a parallel tradition developed in what is now Bangladesh. Thanks to globalization, transnational and translingual writing by Indian Bengalis, and Bangladeshis is becoming an increasingly significant part of world literature.
