Girish Chandra Sen

Girish Chandra Sen (c. 1835 – 15 August 1910) was a Bengali religious scholar and translator. He was a Brahmo Samaj missionary and known for being the first publisher of the Qur’an into Bengali language in 1886. Sen was born in a Baidya family in the village of Panchdona in Narayanganj District in Bengal (now part of Narsingdi District in Bangladesh). He studied in Pogose School in Dhaka. In 1869, Keshub Chunder Sen chose from amongst his missionaries, four persons and ordained them as professors of four old religions of the world. He was selected to study Islam. Others selected to study different religions were Gour Govinda Ray for Hinduism, Protap Chandra Mozoomdar for Christianity, and Aghore Nath Gupta for Buddhism. A firm believer in the basic unity of all religions, he immersed himself in his studies and later went to Lucknow in 1876 to study Arabic, Islamic literature and the Islamic religious texts. After five years (1881–86) of studies, he produced the first Bengali translation of the Quran.