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 to one of his fellow-countrymen about it, and you begin to perceive that there are accents and cadences, lights and shades, that we miss inevitably—strains of the Vaishnava songs, or of a folk-song that was heard in the forest of Vrinda before the English language began to be. And as for the language in which the Vaishnava poets wrote their songs—Rabindranath's mother-tongue—no one but a native can hope to gather up its force and variety of idiom. Turn for some account of its struggles for survival (not unlike those of the Welsh) to the remarkable great book, over a thousand pages long, in which Dinesh Chandra Sen has traced its record. There we hear how jealous the Brahmins were of its use as a written tongue. They wanted the truths of their religion "to be locked up in the Sanskrit texts," and they were afraid of any movement that could give status to the vernacular. Probably they thought, he adds, that the purity of their doctrine would be lost in what they looked upon as a mere provincial dialect. But this hints already at a contempt for Bengali that lasted for centuries, and has helped in our time to quicken the ridicule often cast upon the people and their supposed patois.