148 Gr. A. Grierson — Tulasi-ddsa and the Plague in Benares. [Mat, 



In that verse he cries, ' Is it from my own sin, or from fate, or from some 

 curse ? I cannot tell, I cannot bear, the pangs I suffer in my arm. 

 Drugs, charms, spells, simples, all are unavailing. I pray to God, and 

 he only adds fuel to the fire. Who, in this universe, whether he be 

 Creator, Preserver, Destroyer, Fate or Time, heedeth not thy commands, 



Hanumat ? Tulasi is thy slave. Claim him as thine. Thy delay 

 addeth pangs upon his pangs.' 



In the 36th and the following verses, the language of the poefc be- 

 comes confused. His relief had been but temporary. He no longer calls 

 only upon Hanumat. He commences a verse by addressing that deity, 

 and finishes it with a prayer to Rama-candra. This confusion continues 

 to the last or 44th verse. His disease increases in severity, and in the 

 41st verse, he tells us that his body is now covered all over with 

 ghastly sores. This is borne out by a tradition that when the poet 

 was at the point of death he became a leper. Tlie sores of the plague 

 are evidently referred to. Mahamahopadhyaya Sudhakara-dvivedi adds 

 that in his boyhood he used to hear from his father and from Vandana- 

 Pathaka, the great authority on Tulasl-dasa, that the poefc had com- 

 posed the Hanuman-bahuka in four days, and from the data now before 

 us it seems to be extremely probable that the verses were uttered by 

 him on his deathbed, during the four days he was suffering from plague. 



The only other possible explanation of the poem is the traditional 

 one, that he was suffering from a carbuncle ; but from all we know of 

 the high character of this great man, it seems improbable that he 

 should have used such vivid language regarding what, after all, was 

 not an uncommon complaint, and which was a curable one. Moreover, 

 if the poet had recovered from such a carbuncle, surely the poem would 

 have concluded with some words of thankfulness to the deity whom he 

 had been addressing in such impassioned language. Other works of 

 Tulasi-dasa show that he was the reverse of an ungrateful man, and 



1 am only able to account for the omission of thanks by supposing that 

 he never did recover from the disease which he laments, that he really 

 was suffering from the plague which Jahangir described, and that the 

 Hannman-hahuka was his swan-song, recorded by his friends as he lay 

 at the point of death. 



It is historically true that the poet died in Benares, and that the 

 plague was rife in that city at the time of his death. It also appears 

 that the symptoms of the disease from which he died, so far as the poefc 

 has described them, agree with the symptoms exhibited by patients 

 suffering from that terrible pestilence. 



