Dr. Muhammad Sahidullah

Muhammad Shahidullah was a Pakistani Bengla Linguist, philologist, educationist, and writer.

Shahidullah was born on 10 July 1885 to a Bengali Muslim family in the village of Peyara in the erstwhile Bengal Presidency’s 24 Parganas district.

Shahidullah began his career by teaching at Jessore Zila School in 1908. After working as the headmaster of Sitakunda High School for some time in 1914, he practiced law at Bashirhat in 24 Parganas. In 1915 he was elected as vice-chairman of the town’s municipality. He was Sharatchandra Lahiri Research Fellow (1919–21) under Dinesh Chandra Sen at the University of Calcutta and joined the University of Dhaka as a lecturer in 1921 in Sanskrit and Bangla. During his period at the University of Dhaka, he did research on the origins of the Bengali language.

In 1925, he presented his thesis that Bangla as a language originated from Gaudi or Magadhi Prakrit. He was the principal of Bogra Azizul Huq College from 1944 to 1948. He then returned to the University of Dhaka, serving as head of the Bangla Department and dean of the Faculty of Arts. He taught part-time at the Law Department (1922–25) and the International Relations Department as a teacher of French (1953–55). He worked as head of the Bangla and Sanskrit Department of the University of Rajshahi (1955–58).