Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/116

 94 INTRODUCTION. a collection probably made by the poet himself, when in his old age he bethought him of the gallant master whom he had so long served, and who had died in the flower of his manhood in that last sad battle before Delhi. Throughout all the country of the Rajputs, far down to the mouths of the Indus and the confines of Biluchistan, the Indian bards wandered singing, and a considerable quantity of their poems still lives in the mouths of the people, and has in these latter times been printed. This, as far as I know, is all that Sindh can show of ancient literature. And the case is not far different in the Panjab. In that province the language is still very closely connected with various forms of western Hindi. Though Nanak, the great religious reformer of the Panjab and founder of the Sikh creed, is generally pointed to as the earliest author in the language, yet few writings of his are extant, and in the great collection called the Granth, made by Arjun Mal, one of his disciples, in the sixteenth century, there is nothing distinctly Panjabi. It is stated to be for the most part an anthology culled from the writings of Hindi poets, such as Kabir, Namadev, and others, and consequently the language is pure old Hindi. It is to be observed that in all Western India there is a large number of ballads, snatches of songs, and other unwritten poetry current, which if it could be collected would form a considerable body of curious ancient literature. One circumstance, however, detracts much from the value of collections of this sort, namely, that the genuine old language, with its archaic or provincial expressions, is seldom to be found intact. The reciters of these poems habitually changed the words they recited, substituting for the ancient forms which they no longer understood modern words of similar meaning, so that we are continually being disappointed in our hope of picking up transitional fifteenth century phases of language which undoubtedly did exist in these poems in their original state. Even in written works this has taken place to