PREFACE.
This work consists of the lectures delivered by me as Reader in Bengali Language and Literature to the Calcutta University during the months of January to April 1909, at the Senate House, Calcutta. They treat of our language and literature from the earliest times down to 1850.
The volume now presented to the public has very little affinity with my Bengali work on the same subject, for which I was granted a literary pension by the Right Honorable the Secretary of State for India in 1899. There must, of course, be something in common between the two books, dealing as they do with the same subject, but the arrangement adopted in the present work is altogether new, and the latest facts, not anticipated in my Bengali treatise, have been incorporated in it.
It should be borne in mind that our early Bengali literature had the strange characteristic of forming a gift from the lower to the higher classes. The more cultured ranks of our society under Hindoo rule delighted in the study of classical Sanskrit; during the Mahomedan period, Arabic and Persian were added to this; and the vernacular literature deemed it always a great honour and privilege if it could only now and then obtain an approving nod from the aristocracy. This perhaps accounts for the somewhat vulgar humour that characterises old Bengali writing. But in spite of occasional coarseness a depth of poetry throbbed in the heart of the multitude. I refer my readers particularly to the Mañgala Gāns, to the works of the Manasā and Chandī-cults, and to the Yātrā and Kavi songs. For the great Vaiṣṅava period of our literature, on the other hand, no apology is necessary. In this our people attained the very flowering point of the literary sense. I do not know how far I
