Indian literature has a long-standing tradition of drama writing. For almost a millennium the only form of literature other than odes was drama. The distinction of Sanskrit drama by luminaries like Kalidasa was strong enough to keep audiences absorbed for centuries. But a dawn was coming by the mid-1800s in Bengal where the Bengal Renaissance saw the rise in western education and ideas, and therefore the styles of new forms of literature were seeping in. For example, Ram Narayan Tarkaratna (1823–1885) had already left the Sanskrit tradition and started writing social realism. The drama is markedly different from the earlier dramas of that period; notably, the first modern drama written in Bengali by Ram Narayan still had the old "sadhu bhasa", the artificial Sanskritised dialect of modern Bengali as the writing medium.