Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/660

 620 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [ Chap. The maid- - These &ufnis are numerous in Persian tales. rae They are not of the class of Durvala, the maid- Hindu servant described in the Chandi Kavyas dealt with classics এ not tobe by us ina previous chapter. ‘The latter are knaves confounded —. with who repay the kindness shown to them by creating Kutnis. —disunion amongst the members of a family to serve their own selfish ends and by robbing their masters as much as they can, when entrusted with market- ing. Durvala bears a family-likeness to Mantkara of the Ramayana, though placed in different situa- tions, and these women should not be confounded with the kutfnis of the Mahomedan stories; they are not accessories to immoral purposes. The dufzs perform a quite different function in the Vaisnava poems where love is spiritualised. Indeed the Hindu poets had hitherto taken particular care to keep scenes of illicit love out of their poems. But the Autnuz now became a very common thing in our literature, especially in the poems of Vidya-Sundara. A very striking instance of such women as figuring in the poetry of the age is found in the character of Hira malini in Bharata Chandra’s Annada Mangala—the most popular Bengali poem of the day. Thus in the style of poetry as well as in its spirit, the court literature of Bengal presents a striking The sae ও x depraved difference to the earlier Bengali works. ‘The 5 style and the spirit both became depraved—the inspirit. former by a vain-glorious pedantry which made descriptions grotesque by their over-drawn niceties, thé serious often passing into the burlesque—and the latter by scurrilous obscenities grosser than any- thing in Sterne, Smollett.or Wycherley and by the introduction of characters like those of Hira malini