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THE INDIAN VERNACULARS.
Bharat
Chandra
Rai.
Prasad with 33 acres of rent-free land. The grateful poet inreturn dedicated to the prince his Kabiranjan , or version ofthe tale of Bidya Sundar. The fame of this version has,however, been eclipsed by the rendering of the same story bya rival poet, Bharat Chandra. Two other well-known works,the Kali Kirian and the Krishna Kirtan , in honour respect-ively of Kali and Krishna, with many minor poems, have alsocome down from the pen of Ram Prasad .
The other great Bengal poet of the 18th century was BharatChandra Rai, who died 1760. The son of a petty Raja, hewas driven from his home by the oppressions of the Raja ofBardwan, and, after many adventures and imprisonment, ob-tained the protection of the chief native officer of the FrenchSettlement at Chandarnagar. The generosity of the Raja ofNadiya 1 afterwards raised him to comfort, and he devotedhis life to three principal poems. His version of the BidyaSundar is a passionate love poem, and remains the acceptedrendering of that tale to the present day. The goddessKali interposes at the end to save the life of the frail heroine.His other two principal poems, the Annada Mangal and theMdnsinha, form continuations of the same work; and, like it,are devoted to the glorification of the queen of Siva under hervarious names.
With the printing press and the Anglo-Indian School arosea generation of Bengalis whose chief ambition is to live by thepen. The majority find their career in official, mercantile, orprofessional employment. But a large residue become writersof books; and Bengal is at present passing through a grandliterary climacteric. Nearly 1300 works per annum are pub-lished in the vernacular languages of Lower Bengal alone.It is an invidious task to attempt to single out the mostdistinguished authors of our own day. Amid such a climax ofliterary activity, much inferior work is produced. But it is nottoo much to say that in poetry, philosophy, science, the noveland the drama, Bengali literature has, in this century, producedmasterpieces without rivals in its previous history. In twodepartments it has struck out entirely new lines. Bengali prose practically dates from Ram Mohan Rai; and Bengali journalism is essentially the creation of the third quarter of thepresent century. 2
1 Mr. Dae says, inadvertently, the Raja of Bardwan.
2 From no list of 19th century Bengali authors should the followingnames be omitted:—Ram Mohan Rai, Akkhai Kumar Datta, Iswar