Kundala to the water-side to bathe her before she should be sacrificed. There an explanation was given. He begged her to come again. She declared her intention of fulfilling Bhawani’s will, and while the debate between them was going on, just as he stretched out his hand to seize her and force her to return, the bank beneath her feet gave way, and she fell into the deep stream below. He leaped after her. Both for a time disappeared. The Kápálika length dragged Naba Kumar to land, but Kapál Kundala was seen or heard of no more. And so the story ends, much to the disappointment of most Bengali readers, who much prefer the orthodox ending, where all live happily ever after.
Mrinalini is a book of a very different stamp, and many consider it Babu Bankim Chandra Chatarjí’s most successful production.
But here must end out brief and imperfect sketch of Bengali literature—a literature which, with much that is feeble and base and utterly worthless, yet has within it what may encourage no small degree of hope for the future. Its character is for the most part imitative, but what literature, save that of Greece, has ever been independent and original in its youth? Once and again has a voice from that holy land of beauty and truth awakened the torpid heart and mind of Western Europe. Horace himself, the most spontaneous and genuine of all the Latin poets, entertained no higher idea of originality than to make it consist in the importation of a new form of poetry from Greece. An imitator in those days meant an imitator of Latin authors—the imitation of Greek being almost implied in the excellence of any work. And when Europe woke again from the long sleep which followed on the dissolution of the Roman Empire, it was on the translation and imitation of Greek and Latin authors that its energies were employed. Is there no imitation in Dante himself? It may seem improbable that European ideas will ever really be assimilated by the people of India—that all we can effect here is a superficial varnish of sham intelligence. But everything cannot come in a day, and there was a time when it would have seemed almost equally improbable that the little remnant of intelligence preserved in the Latin Church, and the study of classical antiquity, would have grown into what we now see among the Celtic and Teutonic peoples of the West. The Bengalis may not seem to have the fibre for doing much in the way of real thought any more than of vigorous action; but it was chiefly among the supple and pliant Italians that the revival of learning in Europe began; and it is possible to imagine that the Bengalis—the Italians of Asia, as the Spectator has called them—are now doing a great work, by, so to speak, acclimatising European ideas and fitting them for reception hereafter by the hardier and more original races of Northern India.
