Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/241

 IV.] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 21EfF. drew largely from Nityavnanda Ghos’s work, which was earlier in the field, admits of no doubt. The Kathakas and the professional singers of the Puranas had already popularised the story of the Mahabharata in the country. Those amongst them Why dothe who attained celebrity, by their proficiency in the গা art of recitation and singing, found numerous en- তি gagements all over the province. In their pro- fessional tours they visited all the important villages of the country, and thus the very language they used became familiar to the people. It is pro- bably owing to this reason, that in all the Bengali recensions of the Mahabharata, from Safjaya and Kavindra to Kaci Das and even to more modern writers, we frequently come across the same lines almost word for word, as if the authors whose fields of activity lay at different places and who lived at remote distances of time from one another, had copied from the same-source. If this is, generally speaking, true of the different Bengali recensions of Sanskrit works in our old literature, it is most of all so in the case of Kaciram Da4s’s work and that of Nityananda which preceded it. We often find page upon page of the two works to be almost identical, the slight difference, observable in the Kagiram two works, is no more than what we may find in Nitya- two different manuscripts of the same book. We nanda. have evidence to prove that Kagiram Das did not himself write the whole of the Mahabharata, the authorship of which is attributed to him; and in many portions he simply revised Nityananda’s compositions and incorporated them in his work. Kaciram Das was, however, an expert recension- ist and showed much originality in his work, This