INTRODUCTION. 
xviii 
It teaches the first and great commandment of the Christian law, but 
the second, which is like unto it—Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
thyself—it omits. 
Leaving these two sects aside for a moment, we must pause at 
one remarkable man, who in some respects was an offshoot from the 
Edj'put bards, while on the other hand his writings bear strong 
marks of the influence of Kabir’s teaching. Malik Muhammad 
(fl. 1540) studied under both Musalman and Hindu doctors, and wrote, 
in the purest vernacular of his time, the fine philosophic epic entitled 
the Padmawat. This work, while telling in vivid language the story 
of Batan Sen’s quest for the fair Padmawat, of Alau’d-dln’s siege 
of the virgin city of Chitaur, of Batan’s bravery, and of Padmawat’s 
wifely devotion which culminated in the terrible sacrifice of all in the 
doomed city that was true and fair, to save it from the lust of the 
conqueror, is also an allegory describing the search of the soul for true 
wisdom, and the trials and temptations which assail it in its course. 
Malik Muhammad’s ideal is high, and throughout the work of the 
Musalman ascetic there run veins of the broadest charity and of 
sympathy with those higher spirits among his Hindu fellow-country¬ 
men who were groping in the dark for that light of which so many’ 
of them obtained glimpses. 
To the mere student of language the Padmaicat possesses, by a 
happy accident, inestimable value. Composed in the earlier portion 
of the 16th century, it gives us a representation of the speech and of 
the pronunciation of those days. Hindu writers, tied by the fetters 
of custom, were constrained to spell their words, not as they were 
pronounced, but as they were written in the old Sanskrit of their 
forefathers. But Malik Muhammad cared not for Hindu customs, 
and wrote his work in the Persian character, thus giving necessarily 
a phonographic representation of every word he wrote. The system 
was not perfect, for, as was customary, vowels were seldom indicated, 
but in the Padmaicat we have the consonantal framework of each 
word put down as it was pronounced at the time of writing. 
With Malik Muhammad, the period of the apprenticeship of 
vernacular literature in Hindustan may be said to have come to a 
close. The young giant had bestirred himself, and found that he was 
strong; and, young and lusty as an eagle, he went forth rejoicing to 
run his course. The earlier Baj’put bards wrote in a time of tran¬ 
sition, in a language which it would be difficult to define accurately, 
either as a late Prakrit or as an old form of the modern language of 
