Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/331

 KABIWALAS 307 a part of the social and religious life of the people, and religious festivities, enlivened by singing, were celebrated with a gaiety which had its mundane side. Even with the decline of Baisnabism, which had brought in its wake a glorious time of sweet singing, and with the revival of Sakta and other forms of literature in the 18th century, the tradition of song-making had never been extinct. The Baisnabs, by their peripatetic singing, had spread songs broadcast leavening, as they did, the popular mind ; and although times and circumstances had changed, the perennial love of song, which marks Bengali literature throughout its history, always survived. The political troubles of the 18th century and the social changes consequent therenpon naturally precluded any serene exercise of serious literature except perhaps in remote villages or in the comparatively secure and luxurious courts of noble patrons; but the popular craving was satisfied, on the one hand, by yards, painehali, and other cognate forms of popular literature in which also there was always an exclusive preponderance of the song-element, and by the devotional songs like those of Ram-prasid and his followers, on the other. It was about this time that the Kabiwalas had come into prominence. The time was not for thought: it wanted song and amusement ; the Kabiwalas, who could give them, had soon become popular. But the days of royal or other forms of patronage had been fast vanishing. The poets The audience for fallen on evil days, had to depend whom it was com- posed more and more upon the favour of the capricious and _half-educated public who now became their chief patrons. The ruin of old zemindars and princely houses, begun in the latter days of the Mohammedan rule and completed