Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/330

 306 BENGALI LITERATURE preserving. The change of taste and fashion in the next generation and the contempt with which all earlier writing had come to be regarded could hardly favour the idea of preserving or collecting this literature in any form. It is not surprising therefore that no attempt at a collection and preservation of Our chief source of these 8 songs had been made till in 1854, Isvar Gupta, whose poetic sympathies allied him with Kabiwalas and who him- self was no mean composer of Kabi-song, first collected and published some to these half forgotten songs in the pages of his Saindad-prabhakar. It is chiefly through his untiring zeal and devoted labours, ably seconded by the efforts of a few other later collectors, that we possess what remains of this Kabi-literature ; for although several inferior anthologies have been made since then, most of these, with or without acknowledgment, draw liberally from the rich fund which he had supplied half a century ago and little substantial addition has been made to our knowledge ever since. It is very difficult, in the absence of materials, to trace the origin of this peculiar form of literature, hardly at all literary, which expressed itself in songs but Origin and growth of Kabi-poetry. which was chiefly meant for popular amusement. Most of the songs which have come down to us_ belong to a date posterior to the middle of the 18th century ; in tracing, therefore, the form and spirit of this verse, as it existed earlier than this date, we must be guided chiefly by conjecture derived from the study of the later fragments which have been preserved as well as by an examination of the general drift of the literature itself. It must be noted, however, that song-literature is not a novel thing in Bengali: for it had formed