THE MODERN PERIOD 97 the art of poetry. Narayan Ray was a pupil of Sardar. A much admired work in the Marwari dialect is the RagJnaiath Rupak of Ma7i'sa Ram, which was written about the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is a prosody in which the illustrative examples are so arranged that they give a continuous history of the life of Rama. Bihari Poets.— A few Bihari poets of the nineteenth century may be mentioned, all of whom wrote in the Maithili dialect. Bhajui Nath Jha (fl. 1850) and Harsh Nath Jha (born 1847) both attended the court of the Maharaja of Darbhanga. Bhanu Nath's best known work is a play entitled Prabhavati Haran. Harsh Nath wrote many songs as well as plays. A popular account of the famine of 1873-74, entitled Kavitta Akall, was written by Phaturi Lai, a Kayasth of Tirhut. Chandra Jha, who flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was the author of a Ramayan in Maithili, which is much admired. Religious Verse.— Though a great deal of the literature already described has a religious connection the output of religious verse due directly to the various sectarian movements seems to have been less since the beginning of the nineteenth century than in previous times. Contact with the new influences which have come from the West has led indeed to a great deal of religious activity in India, but a large part of the new movements has been in the direction of religious reform. Prose literature, whether in the form of pam- phlets or newspapers, has come to be very much used for the dissemination of religious as well as other ideas. Still, the production of poetry in connection with the various religious movements did not entirely cease. In 1806 Jai Chand, of Jaipur, wTote a Sanskrit and Hindi work which deals with the doctrines of the Jains, entitled Svdnii Karttikeya^uipreksha. A later Jain of considerable merit w^as Brhiddban Jl (circ. 1791-1858), of Benares. Bakhtdwar (fl. 1817), of Hathras, in the district of Aligarh, who was a religious mendicant, wrote a book entitled Siimsdr, which was intended to 7
