INTRODUCTION. 
XIX 
Raj’put an a. This was the period of infancy. Then came that of 
youth, when, with the revival of a popular religion to fill the place 
once taken by Buddhism, the teachers of the new doctrine had to 
write in a tongue ‘ understanded of the people/ Malik Muhammad 
and the apostles of the two Vaishnava sects had to feel their way, and 
walked with uncertainty. When they wrote, the language spoken was 
practically the same as that spoken now in the rural parts of India, 
and they must have felt the same hesitation which Spenser and Milton 
felt in writing in their vernacular. Spenser chose the wrong method 
and cast his Faerie Queene into an antique mould, but Milton, though 
he once thought of writing his Paradise Lost in Latin, dared to be 
right, and thenceforward the English language was made. So was 
it in India,—the first vernacular authors dared greatly, and succeeded. 
The 16th and 17th centuries form the Augustan age of Hindu¬ 
stani vernacular literature. Nearly every great writer of the country 
lived during this period. Its greatest writers were contemporaries 
with our masters of the reign of Elizabeth, and, to us English, it is 
interesting to note that when our country first came into contact 
by its ambassadors with the Mughal court, and when the East India 
Company was first founded, each of the nations, separated so widely 
by sea and land, was at its culminating point of literary glory. We 
must consider separately the various groups of authors who flourished 
during this age. 
It was in Braj, the country of the cowpens and the scene of the 
childhood of Krisna and of his early amours with the herdmaidens of 
Gokula, that the Krisna cult naturally took its strongest root ; and 
during the 16th century it was the home of a school of poets devoted 
to the worship of that god, founded by the great apostle Ballabha- 
char’j and his son Bitthal Nath. Of their eight principal disciples, 
grouped under the name of the Ashta Chhap , Krish’n Das and Sur 
Das were the ones most celebrated. The latter is considered by his 
fellow-countrymen to share with Tul’sl Das the throne of absolute 
perfection in the art of poesy; but European critics will be inclined 
to award the latter poet alone the supreme crown, and to relegate the 
blind bard of Ag’ra to a lower, though still an honourable, place. 
One more poet of this group may here be noticed for his fame as 
a singer. I allude to Tan Sen, who besides being an author was chief 
court-singer to the Emperor Ak’bar. The principal native authority 
for the Krisna poets of the 16th century is the enigmatical Bhakt 
Mala of Nabha Das, with its various commentaries. 
