What is in a Name?

[What is in a name? Juliet of William Shakespeare had such a question. The reference was a rose. Yes, a rose still smells sweet if it is called by any other name. Therefore, the question stands if it does matter in a nomenclature and if it does not. The following is a little attempt to study the concept with the word “Dulung”.]

Dulung is the Name of a Bengali Magazine for Literature and Sociology

It was an evening in October, 1996. In a small and make-shift stall at the Indian Institute of Technology Durga Puja premises we have been selling an ordinary-looking periodical with a name DULUNG. A young person arrived with his wife. We were encouraged with their smiling faces. They purchased a few issues of the periodical and before parting surprised us with the information that their daughter was named Dulung.

We were really glad. DULUNG is the name of a little magazine that we publish from Kharagpur (a railway town of West Bengal, India). Dulung is an eighteen years old Bengali little magazine for literature and sociology. The periodicity of this magazine has been flexible – issues have been three in a year, ten issues in a year and two in a year.

This little magazine was named Dulung for the following reasons:

1. Dulung is a tiny river flowing through some part of the West Medinipur district and we belong to this district.
2. Our attempt to develop as wordsmith was humble and we had considered us little as little was the river Dulung in comparison with the mighty Ganga or Yamuna or Brahmaputra of the Indian sub-continent.
3. Dulung belonged to the region of West Bengal which was greatly stirred by the movement of the agrarian hapless people in the seventies of the last century. The said movement, known as the Naxalbari Movement under the leadership of a China-inspired communist group of India had touched different cross-section of the Indian society, directly and indirectly.
4. We had a desire to make our readers aware of the state and aspiration of the locals through the periodical.
5. The word ‘dulung’ means passage or motion and this sweet little word has its owner in the  tribal people (Santhal, Lodha, Mal…) who had been driven out throughout the ages to the forested hilly tracks of the Santhal Paraganas of the eastern India by none other than our forefathers and again by the representatives of the British Empire.
6. Dulung is a bi-syllabic sweet little word with a musical resonance probably because of the presence of “l’ and ‘n’. It is pronounced as dooloong and also as doolang.  Dulung has other closer uses such as dulong, dulang, dulonch  and so on.