Page:Classical Poets Of Gujarat.pdf/14

 of the Solanki dynasty. The language in its first stages of growth is traced back to a few centuries before the establishment of Mahomedan dynasties in Gujarat, and it appears to have been fully developed when the Mahomedans came. When Kathiawar was overrun by Rajputs from Rajputana, the natives maintained or acquired a political status and importance, as the rulers and the ruled were both Hindus, and local politics became all-in-all. The language of the ruled as after the Norman conquest in England, devoured the language of the rulers and became the language of the Court, and the importance given to politics made its poetry sink into a nonentity. But it was otherwise in what we call Gujarat proper as distinguished from the land of the Scythian Kathis. The Mahommedan Sultans who came to rule in this part no doubt allowed political advancement to several individual Hindus; but it was not allowed to the Hindu subjects as a whole or in any general way. There were usually no powerful Rajputs to maintain a poetry of chivalry and war, and the Hindus had nothing but their houses and industries to themselves. Agriculture was practised, as at present, by people of particular illiterate castes, who had to work hard for bread in the midst of robbery and official oppression, from which neither the Sultans nor the Imperial Viceroys could save them. Poetry, the off-spring of leisure, was thus left to spring up among the home-keeping