Since there are no books in Bengali available in Switzerland, Don-Grandpapa just bought original prints of Sukumar Roy, Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, etc. and is sending them by post. His orders “read them out loud from your 7th month onwards. They hear everything!”
How does he know about the seventh month “hearing it all”? “If Abhimanyu could hear and learn about the Chakravyuh, our grandchild can learn a language atleast!” Abhimanyu was a warrior prince in one of the two major Sanskrit Epic “Mahabharata” (comprised of 200,000 verses and compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BCE). In the books it is claimed that he learnt about a strategical war position from his mothers womb as they talked about it during her pregnancy.
So, apparently it is true that since sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are already developed at 30 weeks of gestational age (about 7 months into pregnancy), there are studies that show evidence of unborn babies listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, capable of demonstrating what they’ve heard once born.
Beats me that science was that advanced in ancient India to know that this phenomenon is even possible – and in modern India everything is based on taboos and hear-say!
Fascinating stuff.
ANTHROPOLOGY OF LOVE 