Bengali to Pashto Translation

Bengali to Pashto translation connects two communities that met through trade long before the internet. Rabindranath Tagore's 1892 story Kabuliwala, about an Afghan dry-fruit seller in Calcutta, made the Pashtun trader a familiar figure in Bengali homes, and Afghan families and traders still live and work in Kolkata. Bengali, with about 270 million speakers in West Bengal and Bangladesh, is written left to right in the Bengali script, while Pashto, spoken by about 60 million people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is written right to left in an extended Perso-Arabic script with special letters like ټ, ډ and ښ. People use this pair for dry-fruit and asafoetida trade, medical visits, student and family contact, and reading Afghan news. Both languages have retroflex consonants, and both borrow many Persian and Arabic words such as খবর and خبر (khabar).