In this study, Chaudhuri shows how much of early Bengali literary historiography was marked by an anxiety to disavow western influence and to identify a realm of ‘khanti bangali’ or ‘genuinely Bengali’ poetics. Several candidates are offered as exemplars of a pure Bengali style, notably the manuscript-era court poet Bharatchandra and Ishwar Gupta himself. Chaudhuri situates the Gupta-kobi in a realm of demotic letters peopled by such figures at the composer Ramnidhi Gupta aka Nidhu-babu, and Mohanchand Basu, inventor of the half-akhrai. Rangalal emerges as the resolute champion of a new literary manifesto at the mid-century mark, in the introduction to his Padmini Upakhyan, written in response to an assertion that no good poetry could emerge out of Bengal. In this context, Chaudhuri could perhaps have looked at the role of the Vernacular Literature Society in the publication of the work. During the 1850s, for instance, the vls was instrumental in awarding cash prizes for original works of Bengali literature, and Padmini Upakhyan was among the first to win such a prize.