সচিত্র লক্ষণ সেন | Sachitra Lakshman Sen

( 13.) style. It*has enriched the vocabulary of our language. It has added tothe volume of our literary treasures by introducing many new types of composition e. g., novels, epics in blank verse, dramas and sonnets, with the result that Bengali has come to occupy the fore- most place among modern vernacular literatures of India. The under-current of patriotism has risen to the surface in the genial flow of devotional songs, with undulations and onrush foreign to its nature. We are sick with the drum-beats reverberating through the patriotic outbursts of Rangalal, Hem Chandra and Nabin Chandra Sen. As regards the dramas, the satires and farces of Michael Madhusudan, they are crude in form and found lacking in seriousness. In the “Nil Darpan” we find our national honour at stake under the terrible oppression of the European indigo planters, and we find Bengali patriotism aSserting itself with its wounded pride. But the expression which this patriotism finds here is not exactly Bengali. As this age closes, the attention of the Bengali writers seems ‘gradually to be directed to the devotional traditions ofthe earlier era, with the result that the patriotic exuberance came to be toned down and deepened into the soul-stirring invocation of the motherland, conceived asa goddess. Sir Rabindra Nath Tagore is at once the child of the passing and the harbinger of the coming age, or rather of the age which has come. That he is the connecting link between the old age ৪9 the new can be brought home by placing side by side his famous song “efx ভুবনমনোমোহিনি” with Bankim Chandra’s “বন্দে মাতরম্‌" and D. L. Roy's “erqratey Sa" |