Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/82

 58 BENGALI LITERATURE changes as well as the almost entire disintegration of social solidarity will no doubt explain the external circumstances which retarded the growth of literature, but the literature itself since the days of Bharat-chandra had been showing inherent signs of exhaustion and decay, which was only hastened, instead of being checked, by political and social revoluticns. The necessarily slow and laborious process of reconstruction which followed upon these vicissitudes absorbed men’s mind for more than half a eentury from 1800. This will explain not only why we do not come across any great and important writer before we reach the age of Michael or Bankim but it will also exhibit very clearly how literary movements in Bengal had perforce been closely bound up with political, social, religious, and other movements in the first half of the 19th century. Every great writer of this period of transition was of necessity a politician, a social reformer, and a religious enthusiast. We need hardly cite, for illustration, the long list of such important names as those of Ram-mohan Ray, Krsnamohan Bandyopadhyay, Aksay Datta, Debendranath Thakur, Isvar-chandra Bidya- sagar, Tek-chand, or Rajendralal Mitra. Even in the next generation Bankim-chandra could not keep himself entirely free from this universal tendency. Politics, social reform, and religious revival went hand iu hand with literary creation. From 1825 to 1858, if not in the period actually under review in this volume, we shall have to extend our vision and include in our _ Literary movements consideration various aspects of natio- in the 19th century closely bound up with nal history other than the one which political, social, and other movements. is merely literary. To treat Bengali Literature in the 19th century asa series of isolated phenomenon is to give a wrong historical perspective, for here, as everywhere, literary thought and