LOVE-LYRICS 389 popular literature. If the date of Bharat Chandra’s death be 1760 and that of Ram-prasad a few years later, Ramnidhi Gupta must have been at that time a young man of nineteen or twenty: and the influence of Bhara- Chandra and Ram-prasid existed widely throughout this period even down to the middle of the 19th century. On the other hand, all the earliest Kabiwalas and Paiichali- kars were Nidhu Babu’s contemporaries, for the latter lived up to 1838. Nidhu Babu therefore and most of the tappa-writers who followed him were born and bred up in the midst of the conventional literary tradition which these two characteristic phases of. contemporary literature represented. But Nidhu Babu followed neither of these beaten paths ; he struck out into an entirely novel and original line. With the examples of Bharat Chandra’s Bidyasundar and of Ram-prasad’s devotional songs on the one hand, not to speak of the isolated imitatious of still earlier styles, and with Kabi-gain and other forms of popular literature, on the other, Ramnidhi chose to inaugu- raté a new type of love-poetry in Bengali, in imitation of Hindi tappa and kheya/, no doubt, but with a consider- able indication of an original vein. Considering the unquestioned dominance of the current schools and traditions, it is no little or mean indication of courage, originality and genius to establish a new mode of art; and in this respect the importance and originality of Nidbu and the tappa-writers can never be exaggerated. The characteristic charm and value of these fappis, there- fore, lies in the fact that they are Its freedom and spontaneous and free. They are not spontaneity. : hampered by time-honoured conven- tions nor do they pay any homage to established schools and forms of art. They speak of love, no doubt, an eter- nally engaging theme with poets of all times, but they do
