The Bible in Bengali and Hindi: the history of the translations.

1801: the New Testament in Bengali

The Bengali New Testament, translated by William Carey and printed by the Serampore Mission Press, came out in February 1801, in 2,000 copies, according to George Smith's biography. The translation took about seven years of work. Carey's life is already on the site, and what matters here is the book: Smith tells that the printing took nine months and that the printer William Ward and Carey's son Felix set the type with their own hands. For Smith, it was with this book that “the great Serampore series began.”

On the Old Testament, the difference is one of dates. Smith writes that it “appeared in parts, from 1802 to 1809,” that is, the last part came out in 1809.

Odia, Hindi, Urdu: the chain continues

The Serampore team translated into other languages in sequence, and Henry Martyn worked in parallel on Urdu:

On the choice of Odia, Smith explains that the region of Orissa was annexed to the empire in 1803 and that the district of Pooree (Puri) was the center of the worship of Jagannath, which led Carey to prepare an Odia Bible soon after. The pandit Mritunjaya first adapted the Bengali version, and Carey corrected the manuscript verse by verse against the Greek.

Counting whole Bibles and partial translations, Carey and the Serampore team took the Scriptures to more than forty languages and dialects, a figure recorded by the linguist George Grierson and cited by Smith. On the strictest count, only complete published versions, Smith lists 28: seven whole Bibles and 21 New Testaments.

Henry Martyn: Urdu and Persian

Henry Martyn, whom his page presents in detail, completed the New Testament in Urdu in 1810, and it was published in 1814. The Persian New Testament was completed in Shiraz in 1812, and the first edition was printed in September 1815, in Saint Petersburg, by the Russian Bible Society, according to Smith. Martyn died in October 1812 and saw neither of the two editions in print.

Hindi: from the nineteenth century to the Bible Society

Hindi had a path of revisions. The Serampore New Testament came out in 1811, and other versions appeared throughout the nineteenth century. According to the catalog 1000 Tongues, the version of W. Yates and A. Leslie (New Testament of 1848), revised in 1868 by J. Parsons and J. Christian, was adopted as the standard version by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1874. The names and dates of editions vary from one source to another.

The Bible Society of India says on its website that it was founded on February 21, 1811. Today its head office is in Bangalore.

The situation today

Figures on access to Scripture change every year. Worldwide, ProgressBible (October 2026 data, reproduced by Wycliffe Bible Translators UK) counts 7,394 languages in the world, 812 with a complete Bible, 1,863 with the New Testament, and 1,662 languages with no Scripture and no work in progress.

For India, the Bible Society of India reports, on a page updated June 16, 2026, 86 complete Protestant Bibles (7 of them interdenominational), in 145 varieties, and a published New Testament in 91 languages, plus 127 translation projects in progress. For comparison, the 2011 language census counted 121 languages spoken by 10,000 people or more.

Why this matters for those who pray today

The Bible in Bengali and in Odia, languages of West Bengal and Odisha, where Christians are 0.7% and 2.8% of the population (2011 census, according to the page How many Christians there are in India), has existed for more than 200 years. What is missing there is not only the Bible, it is teaching that helps people read the Bible: according to the Pray for India project itself, in some regions more than 90% of church leaders have never had access to a seminary. The Pray for India course, on video and free for the student, steps into that space. The first subject already has Bengali lessons on YouTube, and Odia comes next.