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Hindi
literature of the late medieval period was written in a number of
different dialects. The
dialect of Braj Bhasha, spoken around Agra to the south of Delhi,
was particularly important, partly because this is the area where
the god Krishna is said to have lived.
The greatest of the Krishna-bhakti poets was Surdas, a blind
poet of the 1500's. He
was skilled in describing the child Krishna in very touching and
homely language. The
traditional life stories of poets such as Surdas are probably based
on legend.
Greatest
of the Rama-bhakti poets was Tulsidas (1532-1623).
His Ram-charit-manas (The Lake of the Deeds of Rama), a
version of the Ramayana story written in the Avadhi dialect of
Hindi, is the most popular devotional text in northern India.
The
sayings and songs of the poet Kabir, who lived in the 1400's, are
popular to this day. As
a poet of the Sant tradition, Kabir taught that the path of religion
consisted of an inner search for God, and that the rituals of both
Hinduism and Islam are useless.
Though he often used names such as "Rama" to refer
to the Supreme Being, he did not worship individual deities.
See KABIR. Court
poetry in Hindi is best represented by Biharilal, born about 1600.
He wrote of love and other subjects in skilfully composed
couplets. Biharilal and
poets like him borrowed many of the conventions and images of bhakti
literature for their love poetry.
Hindi
developed from a conglomeration of many dialects and languages, and
came to be known as an umbrella language.
Geographically, Hindi covered a large, central area.
Hindi literature attracted writers from other languages, such
as Namdev (Marathi) and Guru Nanak (Punjabi) to write in Hindi
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