INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT 37 in favour of what may be alled Religious reactions of the 19th cen- tury. religious movements in the 19th rationalistice Hinduism and_ other century bear witness to its inward strength as well as to the inherited spirituality of the Hindu. It is obvious that under these political, social and intellectual conditions, no literature These facts partly worth the name could easily flourish. explain the literary টু ্ barrenness of 0)97১9৮7- With the ruin of the zemindars and ৮8 Brey ant the degradation of the Brahmans, who constituted respectively the aris- tocracy of wealth and the aristocracy of intellect, a process of disintegration had begun in the social fabrie which ended in an absolute dissolution of all social solidarity. It took nearly half a century before there was a general subsidence of these effects and a new order of things could take the place of the old. With a reconstruction of art and ideal, there was indeed the birth of a new world and a_ new literature but, generally speak- ing, from the 18th century to the middle of the 19th, we have only rude unshaped writings, interesting to the student, but no masterpiece, acceptable to all. It was essentially a transitional stage, and there can be no doubt that these vicissitudes of the 18th century and the monotonous material and intellectual development of the first half of the 19th robbed Bengali literature of many an imaginative writer. Caleutta had not yet settled down into a metropolis, and with the dispersal of the Moham- medan government and the Hindu zemindars, there was ~ no fixed intellectual centre which would have brought the advantages of social solidarity among those who still retained literary instincts and aspirations, Bharat- chandra died in 1760 and in a short time occurred
