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And what do Sdmal’s women see and learn? They are not illiterate and secluded fools. That they walk alone and travel riding on horseback is the smallest thing they do. They study the national love and literature as a matter of course, and they study under male teachers too. They advance to refined arts, draw pictures, paint, sing, and even dance. The heroine, who as above mentioned, has married a seeming fool, would not look at the man until convinced of his possessing the very attainments she prized.. The lady dances a most difficult dance—a dance which reminds one of the com- plicate and expressive dances of the Athenian drama, and the seeming fool has to play on the Veena as an accom- paniment to this dance; and it is only when he has played most beautifully on the Veena and played to all the subtleties of the whole dance, that the woman loves the man and repents having not loved such a man. The heart of a woman will never be enslaved until love captivates it. A dance like this is the very verge of social heresy on the part of Sdmal, and the poet adds a grim heterodoxy to his heresy when he makes the father of the lady overflow with open joy and secret happiness to see his daughter and son-in-law excel so well in such an atttainment,
Samal not only constructs in this way what must look like a society of fairy-land to his countrymen, but he also tries to directly dissipate the social superstition
