The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s6.32

c14.s6.32

These are some of the delights with which Vidyāpati, the Bengali-Maithili or Maithili-Bengali poet of the fifteenth century, enriches the Bengali households from the lowliest upto the highest. Indeed, in the Chaṇḍīdāsa-Vidyāpati complex as in the *Chaṇḍī*-poems it is the masses that speak. We encounter here the direct delineations of the diverse incidents in the life that is actually lived by the folk,—the hunters, the milkmen, the cowherds, the traders, the boatmen, the cultivators. Bengali poetry is nothing if it is not democratic. It is life's urges, the *élan de la vie* in its thousand and one forms, that furnish the Bengali poets with the sunshine of Bengal's villages and towns.