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in what is now the district of Kaira. The religion and philosophy of the sacerdotal caste would have been quite -out of place in Rakhiyal’s house, and the poet of the Kunbi is the only poet in Gujarat who could shake off in its entirety from his poetry the hybrid incubus of reli- gion, philosophy and mythology which weighs more or less upon the breast of every other poet of Gujarat. Even Premainand had a Brahmanised audience, and his poems, though relieved of religion in its strict sense, could not quite divorce themselves from the susceptibili- ties of his audience, who would not allow anybody to -waste their time with what had not the air of religion, Premanand éither from his own tastes or through shrewd- ness, tried to win his people to hear him by making ‘them fancy that they were listening to religious song, while in reality he was singing pure poetry which was connected with religion and philosophy by a fiction only in that he did no more than merely draw the ‘materials of his fictions from books which were written in Sanskrit, or, at the most in this that he intended upon mythology for some of his tales. He in fact created a -delusion in the minds of people that he was singing of religious things, and, through that happy delusion, made ‘them read and appreciate genuine poetry with a zesé which religion could never have created so widely or sustained so long, ee Simal, on the other hand, had the good Inck to
