Hana Preinhaelterová (née Pletánková) was born in České Budějovice, the regional capital of South Bohemia. After completing a business secondary school in Plzeň in 1958, she moved to Prague to attend university. There she studied two subjects at the Faculty of Philology of Charles University: Bengali and English. Whereas she chose English for practical reasons, from the outset her most genuine interest lay in India and Indian culture. She was lucky to meet Dušan Zbavitel at the faculty, an excellent scholar and teacher of Bengali and several other Indological subjects. Although Zbavitel was employed at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he also taught courses at Charles University. Zbavitel's main research interest was Bengali literature, and young Hana, under the influence of her teacher, soon became interested in this subject as well (she remained faithful to it for the rest of her life). She graduated in 1962 with degrees in both English and Bengali. Her master's thesis was titled 'Humour in Bengali Folk Literature', which was a topic she would repeatedly return to during her later academic career. After two brief jobs, first at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and then at the Ministry of Education and Culture, in 1964 Hana Preinhaelterová accepted a position at the institution from which she had graduated two years previous, the Department of Asian and African Studies of Charles University's Faculty of Arts. First as a lecturer and later as a reader in Bengali, she spent almost twenty years there teaching Bengali and related subjects. An important break in her early career came in the academic year 1966/67, which she spent at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal. This formative experience would influence not only her scholarly work but especially her teaching. By the end of the 1970s Hana Preinhaelterová's position at the department had become uncertain for political reasons (she was not a member of the Communist Party, and at this time the process of communist 'normalization' was culminating). When Bengali was withdrawn as a degree-granting subject in 1982, she had to leave the university immediately the next year. Luckily, she got a job at the Prague Language School, a safe haven where many persecuted academics found refuge at that time. There she taught Bengali and English until the fall of the communist regime in 1989. The following year she returned to the Faculty of Arts, and in 1991, when Bengali was reestablished as a degree subject, she again started to teach it. Only now, in 1992, was Hana Preinhaelterová allowed to submit her PhD thesis (titled 'Rozpad tradiční hinduistické rodiny v současné bengálské povídce' [The break-up of the traditional
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