Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/111

Rh “He who takes no pleasure in the story of Krishna, beholds Fate close at hand; he shall be smitten with the punishments of Fate, a dreadful death he shall obtain, (Din)krishna relates the story of Krishna,—never shall it be otherwise.”

In modern times a few prose works have been composed of considerable merit, but no originality, being either translations or adaptations from the English and Bengali. The Oṛiyas are beginning to wake up, but none of them have yet received sufficient cultivation to make them really good authors. Nor is there much demand for vernacular literature—the Oṛiya seldom reads, and not one man in a hundred can write his native language without falling into the grossest errors of spelling and grammar at every turn.

The Marathas have also a copious literature. Namdeva, the first poet, whose date is uncertain, but probably about 1290 A.D., drew his inspiration, as was the case with so many poets of his time, from the writings of Kabir and other reformers. Contemporary with him was the celebrated Dnyanoba or Dnyânadeva (ज्ञानदेव Gyândeb, we should call him in the other provinces), who wrote a religious poem called Dnyâneshwari. Then follows a long string of more or less obscure poets, among whom Sridhar (A.D. 1571) deserves notice on account of his voluminous Pauranic paraphrases. Tukaram, the most celebrated Marathi author, was (A.D. 1609) a contemporary of the illustrious Sivaji. An admirably printed edition of Tukaram’s poems has been produced at Bombay recently by two Pandits, Vishnu Parashuram Shastri and Shankar Pandurang. The poems are called Abhangas, or “unbroken”; probably from their being of indefinite length, and strung together in a loose flowing metre. Tukaram was a half-crazed devotee, such as we see so commonly in India, who began life as a petty shopkeeper, but being