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 helped him in his interpretation of Bengal life, there is a rarer savour in it altogether, a savour peculiar to the writer himself.

In Bengal the Kathakas and the ballad-singers still ply their calling as they used to do, and the story of Sita and her exiled lord is still being told and retold; but it is in realising the old mode that we begin to discover where the art of this new diviner of India and the woman's heart begins. Sita, it may be explained, is almost the type-figure of the Hindu wife; but she is also a folk-tale princess "whose tender feet covered with are wounded by thorns," whose eyes shed bitter tears. It needed a tale-teller who had listened in boyhood to such tales as hers told by the Kathakas, and who had then wandered from east to west and learnt the power and subtlety of the greatest historians of the heart, to become equal to the interpretation which he set himself to give to his own region. Sita in fact is merely a single clue; we must look further for the disentangling of the threads, new and old, intricately crossed in Rabindranath's Indian web.

In the art of the tales told by the Bengali village tale-tellers memory and improvisation