§ 18.] THE religious revival of the fifteenth century. 11 
Pran’bati , and Mod 1 bath There is a tradition that the emperor Ak’bar 1 
summoned Sib Sirjgh to Dill! for some offence, and that Bidyapati 
obtained his patron’s release by an exhibition of clairvoyance. The 
emperor locked him up in a wooden box and sent a number of cour¬ 
tezans of the town to bathe in the river. When all was over he released 
him and asked him to describe what had occurred, when Bidyapati 
immediately recited impromptu one of the most charming of his 
sonnets which has come down to us, describing a beautiful girl at her 
bath. Astonished at his power, the emperor granted his petition to 
release king Sib Sirjgh. Another legend is that the poet, feeling his 
end approaching, determined to die on the banks of the holy Ganges. 
On the way he remembered that the stream was the child of the faithful, 
and summoned it to himself. The obedient flood immediately divided 
itself into three streams, and spread its waves up to the very spot where 
Bidyapati was sitting. Joyfully gazing on its sacred waters, he laid 
himself down and died. A Qiva liyga sprang up where his funeral pyre 
had been, and it and the marks of the river are shown there to the present 
day. It is close to the town of Bazit’pur, in the Darbhanga 
district. Such is the fitting legend of the passing away of the great 
old master-singer. 
Bidyapati’s influence on the history of the literature of Eastern 
Hindustan has been immense. He was a perfect master of the art of 
writing those religious love-sonnets which have since become in a much 
degraded form the substance of the Yaishnava bibles. Subsequent 
authors have never done anything but, longo intervallo , imitate him. 
But while the founder of the school never dealt with any subject 
without adorning it with some truly poetical conceit, his imitators have 
too often turned his quaintness into obscurity, and his passionate 
love-songs into the literature of the brothel. 
18. ^?TTXlf?r, Umapati. FI. 1400 A.D. He was one of the 
great poets of Mithila, and according to tradition he attended the 
court of king Sib Sirjgh and was a contemporary of Bidyapati . See 
J. A. S. B., vol. liii, page 77. Cf. ZDMG, vol. xl, page 143, where 
Professor Aufrecht fixes the date of an Umapati, whom Maithil 
tradition claims as being the same as the one mentioned, as in the 
first half of the eleventh century. 
1 It is hardly necessary to point out that the real hero of this story (if it is 
to be believed) cannot have been Ah'bar, who lived in the latter half of the 
sixteenth century. 
