Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/367

 —-- ee eee KABIWALAS 343 the mahad@ and then proceeding to the chz/au and antara ; while in later times singing used to begin, as already indi- cated, with 0116 ০/2/27, From these little fragments, how- ever, nothing definite can be inferred with regard to the nature and history of Kabi-poetry of this period. The three disciples of Gorjla alluded to above were Lalu Nandalal, Raghunath Das and Ramji Das. Their dates are unknown but they must have been living con- siderably later than the middle of the 3০ disciples of 18th century ; for Haru Thakur (born about 1738) was a disciple of Raghu while Nityananda-das Bairdgi (born about 1747) acknow- ledged Lalu Nandalal, if not Ramji also, as his master.’ Raghu had two other great disciples, who in later times earned much poetic fame, in Rasu and Nrsitiha. Ramji, on the other hand, found a worthy disciple in Bhabani Banik? who in his turn was the early patron and instructor of Ram Basu*® considerably junior to most of these Kabiwalas. These are the names of the earlier group of Kabiwalas. 28 8818/5. It will be noticed however that there relation between the is a sort of inter-relation between the lier Kabiwalas. 5 ow are এডি earlier Kabiwalas and all of them ' Sambad Prabhakar, Agrahayan 1261, p.5; but one of the songs attributed to Nitai by [Svar Gupta as well as by later collectors (Kabioaladiger Git, p. 116; Gupta-ratnoddhar, p. 184) bears the bhanita of Ramji Das, which fact would probably indicate, if the attribution to Nitai is correct, that Ramji and not Lalu Nandalal was Nitdi’s Guru. [Svar Gupta speaks of Lalu Nandalal as having flour. ished roughly eighty years before his own time. This rough reckoning would put Nandalal in the latter part of the 18th century. llthcentury, however (p. 341, foot note 2), is too absurd a date for Nanda or Raghu. Opinion on this point vary, but [Svar Gupta’s seems to be more reliable than later unauthenticated conjectures. And what is given above is all that can be gathered from such reliable sources, 2 Sambad Prabhakar loc. cit. 3 Ibid, Aévin, 1261, p, 2.