LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 81

between the first emergence of a Hindu Civilization out of a post-Indie
interregnum towards the end of the eighth century of the Christian
Era and the Muslim conquest of the Ganges-Jumna Basin towards the
end of the twelfth century,1 we find the heroic poetry at the courts of
parochial Rajput princes, descended from Hun and Gurjara Eurasian
Nomad barbarian invaders, being composed, not in the classical San-
skrit of the Mahdbharata, but in a vernacular Hindi which was the living
language caught by the interloping alien conquerors from their Hindu
subjects.2 If now—racing the drum round which our film of Hindu
history unwinds—we pass on, in a flash, to the first phase of a universal
state in which the Hindu Society temporarily arrested its disintegration
after having gone through the experiences of a breakdown and a Time
of Troubles, we shall find the Hindu genius embodied, in this generation,
not in the alien Timurid Turkish Muslim empire-builder Akbar (vivebat
A.D. 1542-1605), but in his contemporary and subject—probably un-
known to Akbar himself—the Hindi poet Tulsi Das (vivebat circa A.D.
1530-1623).3

A priori an alien observer might have expected that a Hindu man of
genius, whose mission in life was to do in the Hindi language what was
done in Latin by an Augustan Hellenic Virgil and in Tuscan by an Early
Modern Western Ariosto, would have chosen for his own literary epic
in Hindi any subject rather than the theme of a Ramdyana whose San-
skrit flokaswQTQ still 'flitting alive from mouth to mouth' in the latter-day
poet's own time, Tulsi Das, however, had a truer intuition of both the
inclinations and the capacities of a catholic-hearted Hindu soul. He
correctly divined that his people's devotion to a Sanskrit Ramdyana
would open, and not close, their hearts to the appeal of a Hindi Ram-
charit Manas; and a Late Modern Western student of the Sanskrit litera-
ture has seen the culminating triumph of'the Ramdyana in this Sanskrit
epic's ability, more than a thousand years after it had set hard in its own
definitive form, to inspire the composition of a Hindi epic 'which, with
its ideal standard of virtue and purity, is a kind of bible to a hundred
millions of the people of Northern India'.4

from the prSkrits, did sharply differentiate themselves from their parents by taking the
revolutionary step that was taken by the Romance languages when they broke out of
Latin, and by English when it broke out of Anglian (see III. iii, 176-9). In crossing this
great linguistic 'divide', these Indo-Aryan languages of the third generation had cut
themselves off from their prakrit parents and their Sanskrit grandparent alike, and had
thereby ensured their hold, more effectively than the prSkrits had ever ensured theirs,
against the risk of an attempt on the part of Sanskrit to capture for itself exclusively the
entire literary allegiance of the peoples speaking these derivative languages as their
mother tongues. A fortiori it was difficult for Sanskrit to deprive of their literary birth-
right the Dravidian languages of Southern India which, like the Ugro-Finnish languages
in Hungary, Finland, and the domain of the Soviet Union, were non-Indo-European.
The Hindu devotional poetry in the Dravidian languages was even less in danger than
a Hindi R$mcharit M&nas was of ever being supplanted by a classical Sanskrit equivalent.

1 See I. i. 85, with n, 2, and II, ii. 130-1.

* See Rawlinson* H. G.: India, A Short Cultural History (London 1948, Cresset
Press), pp. 2*4-1:5.

RdmchSrft Mdnai\> which is an original composition and not a translation of Vllmiki's
work, is one of the great religious poems of the World and not unworthy to be set beside
Paradise Lost' (p. 346).