Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/146

 116 BEN GALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. Chap. ment to illiterate people as fairy tales do to children ; at that very period of fantastic and un Couth composition,-now more valued for philological and historical considerations than for any intrinsic poetic merits, -the vernaculars of Bengal and Behar were suddenly lit up by the rays of two brilliant stars, the precursors of an illustrious host who appeared on our literary horizon with the advent of Chaitanya Deva in the sixteenth century. In order to understand the subjects treated by these two poets, one should first know what Parakıyā Rasa is. Parakīyā Parakīyā Rasa which is sometimes identified RaSa. with Madhura Rasa, forms the essence of the Vaisnava theology. It is akin to the Sahaia cult, which, as explained in a previous chapter, means the romantic worship of a Woman other than one's own wife. By a strange combination of circumstances, this form of idialism, though to the Hindu mind it seems lawless and unhallowed, rapidly attained a highly spiritual form in Bengal. In a country where the portals of the Zenana remain ever closed to the outside world-where in the words of a Bengali poet, '' the rays of the sun may not touch and even the moon is not allowed to see the fair one'-in such an environment as that of the Hindu household, society admits of no opportunity for the free meeting of men and women. Yet human nature is every where the same, and here as elsewhere stringent social rules are ineffective to defeat the impulse of personal choice and romantic love. The greater the opposition, the stronger is the impulse which cries for