Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/246

igS FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY missioning, it follows that the poem may be taken as an epitome of the Bengali civilisation of that period. We do not often realise how ample are the materials now hi existence for a full and continuous narrative of Bengal. Sarat Chandra Das long ago pointed out that the city of Lhasa is a page taken out of mediaeval Bengal. In the influence of the Bengali architect, Vidyadhar, in laying out the city of Jaipur in the reign of Sewai Jey Singh in the first half of the eighteenth century, we have evidence of a later date as to the greatness and enlightenment of the Bengali mind throughout its history. Those streets of Jaipur forty yards wide, that regard for air and the needs of sanitation, that marvellous development of the civic sense, are not modern and foreign but pre-English and Bengali in their source and origin. But to my own mind the Mahabharata is in this matter the master-document. Taking Vikramaditya as the reigning sovereign, we see here a people thoroughly conversant with civic and regal splendour. How beautiful and full of life is the following description of a city rejoicing:—

"And the citizens decorated the city with flags and standards and garlands of flowers. And the streets were watered and decked with wreaths and other ornaments. And at their gateways the citizens piled flowers. And their temples and shrines were all adorned with flowers."

There is need here, it should be added, of a