1917.] Bardic and Histl. Survey of Rajputana , 231 



indirectly in a figurative way. For instance, a bard who 

 wanted to celebrate Raya Singha's liberality and the great 

 number of elephants he gave away to the Caranas, pictured 

 Indra as full of anxiety for his elephant Airavata, lest Raya 

 Singha should take it away from him and give it to some 

 Carana. Another bard, who composed on the same subject, 

 represented the many elephants given away by Raya Singha 

 as throwing up with their trunks the dust of infamy over the 

 heads of misers. A third one depicted the same elephants as a 

 congregation of clouds pouring clown rain and inundating the 

 earth to drown the less generous chiefs. In some gitas the 

 subject is described in a plain and simple way, without figures, 

 but such gitas, though they may be more helpful to the histo- 

 rian, are considered as very poor compositions by the rhetorician. 

 Lastly, instead of repeating the same simile or figure in all the 

 four stanzas, the bard often prefers to form a complex similitude 

 and develop it gradually in the four stanzas, in which case each 

 >tanza has a separate contents of its own, different from the 

 contents of the other stanzas. To give an illustration, suppose 

 the bard wants to commemorate a battle and has chosen for 

 it the similitude of a rain storm. In the first stanza he will 

 begin by describing the gathering of the clouds, in the form of 

 the two opposite armies, and the darkening of the sun by the 

 dust raised by the marching of the elephants, horses, and men 



In the second, he will represent the roaring of the elephants 

 and the beating of the drums as the thundering, and the 

 flashing of the naked swords as the lightning. In the third, 

 he will depict the discharge of arrows, bullets, and balls, as a 

 downpour of rain and hail : and in the fourth he will probably 

 <onclude his Similitude by saying that the earth, fecundated 

 by the rain, produced the harvest of victory . 



The commemorative songs given below were composed at 

 different times during the two last decades of the fifteenth 

 century, and the six or seven first decades of the sixteenth 



century A.I). 



posed 



I have explained elsewhere > the meaning of the term Dingala, 

 and have also remarked that, analogously to the division ot the 

 common vernacular into Old Western Rajasthani and Maravan 

 (or (Jujarati), Dingaja may be also divided into two stages, 

 which I have named Old Dingala and Later Dingala, respectively. 

 The term of separation 'between the two stages, may be ap- 

 proximated fixed towards the close of the sixteenth century 

 A.D. The" existence of an Old Dingala stage is ignored by the 

 bards, uho for centuries have been doing all their best to 

 modernize the form of any Old Dingala work which they have 

 preserved, therebv eliminating from it all those phonetical and 

 morphological peculiarities, which form the most striking 



**—"*■ I p I t^^ -Mi 1 I I I I I ■ M^^M "II" " "■ ** ' ' 



1 Joiirn. As. Soc. of Beng., Vol. X, No. 10, 1914, pp. 375-77. 



