পাতা:Vanga Sahitya Parichaya Part 1.djvu/২৮

20 iNTRODUCTION. adjacent districts of Western India. I have secured one of the old Hindi versions of the tale “revised and corrected by Pundit Vinduprasāda Mishra Săraswata” and printed at the Kalpataru Press, Benares, and I have obtained information of another version published from Allahabad. Babus Bhagabati Sahāya, M.A., B.L., and Vaidyanātha Nārāyaņa Singha, M.A., B.L., members of the Calcutta University, declare that these poems were once very popular in the villages of Bhagalpur and in still remoter places Hindi & Urdu versions of Upper India, where parties of minstrels used to wander about the country singing the songs. There can be no doubt that the original home of these songs was Bengal. In the Hindi version too we find descriptions of Chānd, the merchant king of Champā, of Behulā the daughter of Sāha the merchant, and of Sanakā, the queen of Chānd. That these songs were imported from Bengal is not only indicated by the localities of the incidents described in the poems, but also by the fact that the Hindi poems themselves were frequently required to be sung “in Bângăl Räga’’ or the tune prevalent in Bengal. There is also a frequent mention in these poems of that favourite tune of the Bengali rustics, the Bhātiyāl Råg, with which our village people are so familiar. The poems must once have been sung with great pomp at Magadha and other capital cities of Bengal from which they made a triumphant march westward and caught the fancy of our Hindusthani brethren. (pp. 172–74) We certainly miss the pathos of the tale in the Hindi version and the great poetry with which it was endowed by the Bengali writers in the 16th century. These songs of Bengal must have travelled to distant countries in their comparatively earlier stages and they bear a greater affinity to the earliest poems of Bengal than to the later ones. I have found one passage in the Hindi version in which the description of Manasā Devi's ornaments tallies almost exactly with that found in the poem of Hari Datta, the earliest known Bengali poet of the Manasā cult. Not only the songs of Manasā Devi, but those of the Pål kings eomposed to celebrate their heroic deeds and specially “ಸ್ಮಿ? * * Rājā Gopi Chandra's embracing the ascetic's vow, are found in various parts of India. In the Hindi version of the poem by Laksman Dās, the king Gopichänd of Bengal and his mother Maināmati (written as Mainābati in Hindi), and the religious teachers Jalendhara and Goraknatha are mentioned almost in the same way as in the Bengali poems recovered from Northern Bengal. The Uriyā. version which bears a greater affinity to the Bengali ones and which was recovered by Mr. Nagendranath Basu from a MS. 200 years old, found in Mayurbhanja, has been quoted in part in the present compilation (pp. 85-94). But this song was not restricted to upper India alone. The pathos