Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/229

 IV. ] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 599 Yet Safijaya’s work is one of the shortest epl- The honour due to the tomes of the Mahabharata that we know of; it is pioneer. characterised by simplicity of style, and does not even possess any uncommon poetic merit. The manuscripts of Safijaya’s Mahabharata have been recovered from all parts of Eastern Bengal. The great popularity, it once commanded, is explicable only by reason of its being the earliest Bengali recension. Generally speaking, manuscripts of Saii- jay’s Mahabharata are very voluminous, as chapters written by subsequent poets have been added to them at different times. The Adiparva by Rajendra Das, the Dronaparva by Gopi Nath Datta and numerous compositions by other writers are now inseparable factors in many of such manuscripts; and these two poets at least excel Safijaya in the wealth of their descrip- tions and in the beauty and elegance of their style. Safijaya’s antiquated forms of expres- sion give him no advantage in contrast with Rajendra Das’s racy and poetic lines; yet the whole manuscript, about two-thirds of which belongs to other writers, is popularly known as the Mahabharata of Safijaya. This writer evidently then enjoys precedence because he was the first in point of time. Safijaya takes care in his Vanita that his name may not be confounded with that of the great Sanjaya, gifted with clairvoyance, who relates the incidents of the war to the blind — monarch Dhritargstra in the Mahabharata itself, and frequently emphasises on the point of his authorship of the work as distinguished from their recitations by Safjaya. We however know very little of his life-—the autobiographical account