Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/193

 IV.] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE: 163 renderings of the ancient stories to this day during winter evenings by the roadsides and in the villages of Bengal. The performers may be as many as eleven or twelve in number, of whom one, the Gayen is the leader or soloist, while the rest act as a kind of subdued, humming chorus. The Mangal or reci- tation is held in some large court or in the open air. The Gayen stands in a prominent position, often Wearing a crown on his head and Wupura or cym- bals on his feet, while his chorus sits crouching in a semi-circle behind him. He _ begins to narrate a Pauranik story, singing the metrical verses of a vernacular translation from some Sanskrit poem. He acts as he sings, and the Nupuras make a jingling accompaniment to his measured and rythmical movements ; even now and then his recitation is interrupted by some moral or theological digression of his own, which is often of extraordinary depth and beauty. This will end with a song, in which, at a given signal, the chorus joins, dwélling on a low droning note, and giving to the main narrative a major or minor character according to the musi- cal interval they maintain between themselves and the solo. In this quaint spectacle—which will draw hun- dreds or even thousands of men and women to see TheMangal রর : : zl Gans give it, night after night, for months at a stretch,—we a glimpse catch a glimpse of rorld Id that: even the ene glimp a world so o vat: eve হাল world, Pauranik Renaissance itself, beside it, seems to be a thing of yesterday. The intellectual history of India ever since Cankaracharyya in the end of the Seventh century has been one long story of the pro- gressive democratising of the Vedanta philosophy ; and the theological and devotional profundity