46 SOCIAL SCIENTIST sins. On the one hand they dehumanise life and on the other they are themselves the product of the dehumanised life. In spite of the idealism of his faith he imbibed the peasant plebeian revolution of his times, in its full depth, in its human purity and in its true grandeur. He accepted in its entirety what the people's imagination gave him in full measure. He saw the social reality of his time from the point of view of the revolting plebeian, that is, from the point of view of human freedom. He experienced the humanising effect of the revolution in his very bones. In spite of his religious faith, he depicted the revolution in a secular form, in the form of humanised love of two young people in full confrontation with the established order. He understood the revolution so well that he grasped its antithesis—the evil essence of that social system in its stark reality and rendered it in the human shapes of the ka^i and Kaido. He has such a firm grasp of the life of his times, that each character that appears in his creation is every inch alive. The characters come alive because each has its roots firm in social reality. 1 K Marx and F Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1968, p38. 8 K Marx and F Engels, quoted in E Kamenka, Marxism and Ethics^ p 39. 3 F Engels, Anfi-Duhring, Moscow 1962, p 131. 4 Maya is often confused with illusion. It is the daughter of the sea goddess (the goddess of wealth) in Hindu mythology. It is acquisitiveness and greed which make a man blind to all refined things in life. 5 K Marx and F Engels, quoted in Erich Fromm (ed). Socialist Humanism, Alien Lane, London, 1967, p 246. 6 Warris Shah : Heer Warns, Bhasha Vibhag, Punjab, p 1. 7 JW.,p69. 8 Ibid.,p6Q. 9 Ibid. 10 Quoted in Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, Frederick Unger Publishing Co, New York, 1969, p 8L