42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST iheSmaranMukur anecdote may cross the hermeneutic horizon of its author. It may prompt us to observe how "amazement and respect" for duplicating technology concealed (and expressed) a caution and a doubt about the duplicity of the producer of that technology and of its products. The root problems of the cultural history of nineteenth-century Gujarat can be seen clearly only when we realize that both that enthusiasm and that skepticism were simultaneously real. When contradictions constitute a reality, no study of that reality can afford to overlook the polyphyletic and polysemic relationships amongst the contradicting constituents. Gujarati language derives from Gurj ar Apabhramsa, for which Acharya Hemachandra (twelfth century C.E.) composed Siddhahaima Apabhramsa Vyakarana. From BharateSvaraBdhuballGhor(\\%5 C.E.), an unbroken tradition of literary composition, in written and oral streams, has been available in Gujarat. Large and well maintained collections of manuscripts, many beautifully illustrated, have been available in the bhandaras of the region. Scribes continued to copy and scholars continued to study these texts even through the politically uncertain times of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Prose never was the dominant medium of expression in Gujarati literature before the nineteenth century. However, some works were composed in the narrative prose genres \ik.ecaritra(PrthvicandraCantra, 1422) and katha(SamyakatvaKatha, 1355) and in the descriptive prose genre varnaka. Prose in the balavabodha genre was simple and attractive even to the uneducated. The graphic prose of the eighteenth-century vacanamrta of the Svaminarayan sect included graceful descriptive, narrative, and dramatic elements, and was quite popular in many sections of Gujarati society in the nineteenth century. Legal and administrative metalanguage was also available, But the dominant mode of literary composition had been verse. Extensive and excellent work was available in several genres which developed over the centuries. These included lyrical genres \ikepada, garbi, dohd, chhapa, baramai, dhol, thai, drddh, arati, and narrative genres like rdso, charitra, dkhydn and vdratd. Poets from Narasimha Maheta (ca. fourteenth century) to DaySrSm (early nineteenth century) were read, sung, and revered. There was a considerable amount of literature of knowledge m thefnana-mdrgi verse compositions. Technically sophisticated accounts of ontological and epis-temological systems of both kevaladvaita and Suddhddvaita darSanas were given in several verse compositions. Better known among these were works by Akho (sixteenth century) and DayarSm (early nineteenth century). Along with this, a critique of the stagnant elements of the native cultural tradition was presented by all these poets, under direct or indirect influence of the Ndth sampraddya. No sense of aesthetic inadequacy could be detected in the tradition of Gujarati literature, as it runs down to the early part of the nineteenth century, coursing through seven centuries of memorable and profound expression in narrative verse