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rulers with whom they were in touch. It is the mer- eantile Banyas and the sacerdotal Brahmans who hear poets, and it is among them that the woman is free.

The Brahman woman here is not only free, but she maintains ber power within her jurisdiction ‘poeti- cally. Thus the lady-poet Divali puts the case of her sex before the royal hero of her poem in-a very popular spirit, and asks him not to laugh at, or look down upon, the wants and wishes of his wife. Gently he is to induce her to open her heart; and, even when he, w great king and man, thinks she talks and wants non- sense, he is to lovingly minister to her desires. For she reasons in Goldsmith’s way and thinks that to little women their little things are great. Her hero is thus told that women have an unwritten Sdstra of their own which is superior to the six Sdstras or philosophies of men, and which neither men nor the Sdstras of men can hope to understand. In these matters men are asked to implicitly obey the wishes of women. And this lady Divali was a child-widow, who thanked her parents for having filled and brightened up her blank and bleak career with the pure and noble teachings of Tulsi- das. For with such assistance, she says, the little woman Divali went undaunted on the right path where great. people of the masculine sex had erred.

‘We must now conclude. The poets of Gujarat have on the whole, no doubt, had more than enough of religion