INTRODUCTION

The ritual of all the greater gods and goddesses of modern Hinduism is the result of a syncretism extending over at least three milleniums. The figures of the gods of Vedic times have receded, till today Indra, once the greatest, has only one temple in all India; Varuṇa has dwindled into being lord of the sea, an element which touches the life of India hardly at all; and Agni has become a kind of nobler lar domesticus. Their place has been filled by deities whose principal names, in some cases, are not even mentioned in the Vedas. Vishṇu, in his avatārs as Rāma and Kṛishṇa, and Śiva divide the allegiance of the vast majority of Hindus. This allegiance is further divided, by the existence of Śāktas, worshippers of the female energy, śakti, of these deities. Their worship is an expression of the age-long Hindu recognition of a dual principle in nature, purusha (male) and Prakṛiti (female). For practical purposes, Śāktism may be regarded as the worship of Durgā or Kālī, Śiva's consort. About this worship a vast jungle of ritual has grown up, and scholars will probably always be occupied with the effort to disentangle this or that brake of ritual, and to identify its original root. Pārvatī, daughter of Himālaya; Umā, the gracious and (as Satī) self-immolating wife; Kālī the terrible; Durgā 'the unapproachable,' less terrible than Kālī—these are all manifestations of the one goddess, Śiva's consort. Kālī and Durgā may be originally goddesses of the savage tribes whom the Aryans found lurking in inaccessible forests; Pārvatī may be a mountain deity—these matters may be studied elsewhere. Their names do not occur in the Vedas.

Śiva—called by many names, Mahādeva, 'The Great God'; Bhairava, 'The Terrible One'—is the Destroyer.[10] He is the great Ascetic, with matted locks, seated in age-long meditation, or haunting burning-grounds, wandering fiercely, accompanied by ghosts and goblins. At first sight, it might seem that no more repellent deity could be imagined; but there is so much of sublimity in the conception of him that many of the most religious Hindus have been attracted by his figure. It is easy to understand and to share this attraction. The dreadful need not be immoral, and it can be, often is, sternly bracing, as well as wildly poetical. All men in the end must come to the burning-ground; and the God who is a destructive fire, shrivelling to ashes all that is transitory and fleshly, who is divine negligence personified, meditating amid the ruin of worlds or wandering among the cinders which are all that is left of men's hopes and passionate love—all except memory, growing ever fainter as the years pass—this God in the mind's bleaker moods may bring such sad exultation and courage as men have felt on a lost battlefield or amid eternal snows.

But much of Śiva's worship has gone to his consort, Kālī or Durgā. Possibly because it was felt necessary to remove the God beyond the operation of karma or activity, logically involving change and consequences, within the first millenium of the Christian era the tendency grew up to centralise and intensify his energies in his śakti or female counterpart. Vishṇu, too, has his śakti, as have all the gods; but it is round the names of Kālī and Durgā that the great bulk of Śākta worship has gathered. The manuals of this worship are the Tantras, whose number is variously estimated. Hundreds have been lost, but very many survive.[1] Parts of the Purāṇas also deal with the Śākta cult. The whole cult is very obscure, partly because it enjoins the strictest secrecy; but it is known that in its worst forms it is perhaps the vilest and most degraded worship that has ever been. Śiva is not only destroyer, but lord of [11]reproduction, and his worship is most widespread in its phallic form, the adoration of the liṅga. But that symbol has been so changed from its true shape that the sight of it does not do the evil that might be expected. It is otherwise with the worst side of śakti-worship.

Durgā is first mentioned in the Mahābhārata,[2] in a passage where she is the sister of Kṛishnṇ, like him dark-blue in colour; she upholds heaven by her chastity, lives in the Vindhya mountains, and delights in wine, flesh, and animal sacrifice. Presently we find her 'definitely made the wife of Śiva,'[3] and addressed as Umā, the gentle and propitious. In later legend, she destroys demons and giants, devours the flesh of her enemies and drinks blood. The Durgā-pūjā is the great festival of Bengal, when friends and families come together. Durgā's image is decorated; on the sixth day she is awakened; on the night of the eighth day countless goats and some buffaloes are sacrificed to her. Many families, however, especially Vaishṇava ones, celebrate the pūjā with bloodless sacrifices of sugarcane or pumpkins, severed in half in one blow, just as the living victims are decapitated with one stroke. One great family offers a single betel-nut, which is laid before the image, and then sacrificed by a blacksmith who has been practising the feat of exact division in two for the past three months, and receives a hundred rupees for his services. In other cases, all pretence of 'sacrifice' is dropped and flowers are offered. The pūjā seems to be growing yearly gentler in spirit. The goddess keeps her ten arms and weapons of menace, but the latter are hidden with tinsel and lotuses; the face is benign, and the whole figure is made beautiful. Fewer goats are sacrificed, fewer houses have their own images, the pūjā becoming less of a worship, and much more just a national holiday of great happiness.

To Durgā as Kālī, human sacrifices used to be offered, before their prohibition by the British Government. [12]The Thugs, robbers who mixed with travellers and then strangled them in lonely places, regarded their victims as sacrificed to Kālī.

In the Śākta-cult, the worst side of Kālī-worship culminates. Of its two sects, the 'right-hand Śāktas' do not practise the more evil ritual. The worship of the 'left-hand Śāktas' is done in secret, usually at night. It consists of partaking of the five tattvas, i.e. realities,[4] viz. wine, meat, fish, parched grain, and sexual intercourse. Sometimes a naked woman represents the goddess. The worshippers are an equal number of men and women, of any caste, and may be near relations. These rites, and the human character built upon them, have been pictured for us by Bankimchandra Chatterji, in a book which is one of the master-examples of the shorter novel, Kapālakuṇḍalā;. The picture is drawn, without revolt or sympathy, in the detached spirit of Art, by one who was in most things a conservative Hindu.

The left-hand Śākta-cult, in addition to its sacrificial and sexual features, is distinguished by a very extensive practice of magic. This is partly built upon a fantastic physiology. The human frame contains an immense number of channels of occult force, the chief of them being the sushumṇā; in the spinal cord. The occult force is centralised in six circles. In the lowest of these, the goddess lies asleep, coiled three and a half times round a liṅga, serpent-fashion. She can be awakened by Śākta-yoga or Śākta-meditation, and induced to ascend to the highest circle. When asleep in the lowest circle, the mūlādhāra, the goddess is called Kuṇḍalinī, 'The coiled one.'[5] These circles and channels of occult force are sources of miraculous power to the initiated. The Tantras contain many detailed instructions in sorcery, which was practised in early times. In the Mālatī-Mādhava, a drama composed in the eighth century by Bhavabhūti, the famous Sanskrit poet, we are taken 'in the twilight to the burning-ground, fetid with the fumes [13]of the funeral pyre.'[6] There the hero Mādhava comes, 'his hair ceremonially braided, a sword in one hand and a piece of human flesh in the other, He has come to invoke the disembodied spirits that haunt the spot, hoping to barter the human flesh for supernatural power to aid him in winning Mālatī.'[6]

Śākta hymns contain many references to both the philosophy and the practice of the cult. Such references will be found in the hymns of Rāmprasād in this book, though we have tried always to give the most intelligible translation of a passage, and not to trouble the reader with a subtle and sometimes dull, occasionally disgusting, significance. But the better side of Śāktism is the one which is generally present in Rāmprasād. Further, it should be very clearly borne in mind that, even among the left-hand Śāktas, probably very few practise the extreme cult. The great majority of Hindus regard that extreme cult with abhorrence. Many Bengalis would not understand every allusion, even in Rāmprasād.

The worship of Durgā and Kālī is perhaps most deeply rooted in Bengal, as has already been indicated. I think it would not be hard to find reasons for this. Take the case of a celebrated predecessor of Rāmprasād, Mukundarāma, known as Kavikaṅkaṇ or 'gem of poets,' who finished his chief poem, the epic Chaṇḍī;, in 1589. This poem lives today mainly for its value as giving a picture of the village-life of Bengal, three centuries ago. It is at present being edited by a distinguished Bengali scholar and author, who tells me he finds his work very dull; happier times have robbed the poem of much of its appeal. For the poet lived in an unhappy age. In some respects, he is like a Bengali Langland, giving us his vision of Piers Plowman. The local Musalman rulers practised great oppression, and the people felt wretched and helpless. It was natural for them to look for outside assistance, and the thoughts of the poet, their spokesman, turned to Chaṇḍī (Durgā), the powerful goddess in whom the dreadful energy of [14]Śiva was active. In Chaṇḍī; the beasts of the forest complain to the goddess that they are in terror of Kālaketu the hunter. Under the guise of their speeches and of Chaṇḍī's, the political state of Bengal is set out.

Today, men are feeling too proud to consent to be wretched or to despair. Rabindranath Tagore, as is well known, is no lover of Śāktism; and, like many patriotic Bengalis, he feels that the time for such an attitude as Mukundarāma's has passed. 'The poet was a poor man, and was oppressed. So his only refuge was in the thought of this capricious Power, who might suddenly fling down the highest and exalt the lowest.'[7] It is interesting in this connection to notice that the great period of Śākta-poetry in Bengal was the end of the eighteenth century, when the country's fortunes had reached their lowest ebb, and were about to turn towards prosperity. It is true that Śākta-poetry is written today; but if we would see the adoration of the terrible goddess in all its sincerity and passion, we must go back to the eighteenth century, to the period when the Bengali mind became so unhappy and so darkened, when men died and despaired so easily, and when the number of satīs[8] increased to such a grim extent, in the last half-century before the rite was abolished. The cult of Kālī received another great revival in the days of the swadeshi struggle, within the present century, when the thought of the educated classes began to be consolidated in the demand for the control of their own destinies. There was a strong attempt to identify it with nation-worship; Kālī was held to be Bengal personified. This aspect of the cult is perhaps not very far below the surface even now. But there has come such an access of mental happiness and of self-respect to the people, that it is certain that they will not again feel as despondent as the poet of Chaṇḍī; did, with no hope but from the intervention and irruption of sudden, irresponsible power. At least, it will be unreasonable if they do.

[15]

This view of the reason (in part) for the prevalence of Kālī-worship is, I think, borne out elsewhere than in Bengal. Kālī was the tutelary goddess of Chitor. She has her blood-blackened shrines still on the deserted plateau where only the crumbling temples and palaces remain. No legend of Chitor is better-known or more impressive than that which tells how a giant form was seen between the pillars of the rāṇā's house. 'I am hungry,' said the goddess; and demanded that twelve who bore the crown of Chitor must perish. And (we are told) eleven of the king's twelve sons and the king himself assumed brief rule and perished in battle. The world has never seen more devoted soldiers than the Rajputs of Chitor. But their history shows that they despaired very quickly. A walk round their astounding defences, in one spectator at least—who had seen a good many battles—raised admiration for the skill and courage that could take such a fortress, against such defenders. Nothing but the conviction, that some Power was crying for their blood, and that they were doomed, could have brought them to such a resolved helplessness as made them three times send their women to the funeral-pyre and themselves to death outside the walls.

But it is not political distress alone that makes men's minds gloomy. After many years' residence in the poorest district in Bengal, I have felt there is some sorrow deeper and more permanent; the peasant is fighting a losing battle. One year the heavens are shut and there is drought. The rivers are empty sands. Famine follows; and incalculable misery. The next year it rains in excess, and the vast watercourses swell with huge floods. The streams feel their way along their banks till they come to the sandhead which blocks an old course—Bengal is full of these 'blind rivers,' as they are called. Here the water checks a moment, like a darkened mind groping and feeling. Some dim memory stirs that once, it may be a century ago, the way was here; then the waters gather together, and plunge through. A[16] village two miles from the main river, living in security all these years, beside its 'blind river,' will wake at midnight to find a shoreless sea heaving and thrusting at the mud walls. This experience may be repeated, not once, but often in one Rains, as if Nature were an ogress, watching till the folk had put together some makeshift shelter of palm-leaves and mud, to dash it to ground again. So the long, bitter fight goes on. The people, after centuries of this, have become patient, uncomplaining, hopeless. I am speaking of the villages. It was in the villages that Rāmprasād and the poet of Chaṇḍī; lived: Calcutta is a different world. But there come years when Nature seems caressing, indeed a Mother; when the rain is neither too much nor too little, but just sufficient. The fields are filled, the mud huts stand. It is not strange that Bengal should think of God as a Mother; yet, as Rāmprasād's songs show, should think of her with fear, as capricious and sometimes terribly cruel. It is to this Mother that the Śākta-poets have turned; for, as Rāmprasād reminds us frequently, her lord is Bhōlānātha, 'lord of forgetfulness,' the God who wanders abstractedly or sinks into meditation. There is little chance of help in him. Śakti has all his dreadful power, and her energy is unsleeping.

Not much is known of Rāmprasād. He was born at Kumārhātī, near Hālisahar, in 1718. His birthplace is within the old bounds of Nadiyā, a district which is the very heart and metropolis of Bengal's life and history. From here it was that Lakshmaṇ Sen, its last independent king, fled before the Musalmans; it was in this district that the great court of the Rajas of Kṛishṇagar, centuries later, kept art and poetry alive. Śileidā, the favourite retreat of Bengal's most famous poet today, is in Nadiyā.

Rāmprasād was the son of Rāmrām Sen. His descendants today are Vaidyas by caste, and in his poems he refers to himself as a Vaidya;[9] but it has sometimes been asserted that he was a Brahmin. He [17]received some education; knew some Sanskrit, Persian, and Hindī, and, when a very young man, obtained a post in Calcutta, as copyist with Vakulachandra Ghōsāl, the dewān (manager) of an estate. Like other poets before and since, he found officework irksome, and he filled his books with scribbled verses. His employer discovered this, and was angry; but when he read, 'I do not want this copyist's work. Give me your treasuryship, Mother,' his sense of humour or his sense of piety overcame his annoyance. He became a generous friend and patron, settling on the poet a pension of Rs. 30 (£;3, according to the reckoning of John Company days) a month, and introducing him to the Kṛishṇagar Court. Here Rāmprasād rose in favour, and won the title of Kavirañjana or 'Entertainer of Poets.' He had a rival, one Aju Goswāmī, a Vaishṇava. We do not know much about their relations with one another, but they seem to have been kindly. Rāmprasād wrote, on one occasion, 'Free me from the net of Māyā;(Illusion), Mother'; to which his far from ascetic compeer replied with the prayer, 'Bind me in its wide chains.'

His fame was well established in his lifetime, and there are many legends about him. To one of these he laughingly refers in No. LVI of this selection. Others are obviously of later date, invented to explain the genesis of this or that poem. For instance: on his way to the Ganges, he met a woman who asked him to sing to her. He told her to wait at his house, till he returned from bathing. When he arrived and asked for her, she had gone, but had left a note for him in the family temple. This note informed him that the goddess Kālī had come from Kāśī (Benares) to hear him sing, and now commanded him to go to Kāśī. He fell ill on the road, and composed the song, 'I cannot go, but your Feet shall be my Kāśī.' Recovering, he tried to go on; but fell ill again, and saw Kālī in vision, telling him to forgo the journey. He obeyed her, making the song which is No. XV in this book.

Rāmprasād had friends and patrons in Calcutta, and often visited the town. He died in 1775. The older[18] tradition was that the night of his death he worshipped Kālī and composed the song, 'Tārā, do you remember any more.'[10] Then he died singing, like Saxon Caedmon; with the conclusion of the lyric, his soul 'went out through the top of his head,' and passed to the World of Brahman, whence there is no return to this wearisome cycle of births and deaths. But Dr. Dineshchandra Sen, the historian of Bengali Language and Literature, tells me he has ascertained that Rāmprasād, following in a trance the clay image of Kālī, when it was thrown into the Ganges, on the Kālī-pūjā day, was drowned. He adds, 'The old men of our country, altogether devoid of any historical sense, created fables out of anything they could lay their hands on, in the poems themselves, for lack of reliable information. The Sanskrit poetic canons have laid it down that unfortunate events in the life of a great man should not be narrated. Thus, the true accounts of the death of Chaṇḍīdās, who was killed by the order of an Emperor of Gaur, of Chaitanya, who died of an inflammatory fever caused by a sore, of Godādhar, who was burnt alive by the Muhammadans, have not been recorded by our biographers, and the truth has been hidden by wild legendary fables.'

Rāmprasād's works, other than his Śākta songs, are the Bidyāsundar (Vidyāsundara) Kālīkīrtan,[11] Śivasaṅ̇kīrtan and Kṛishṇakīrtan: the last three are very short, a few pages. The theme of the Bidyāsundar is an old Bengali story. The Rājā of Burdwan had a daughter[12] famous for her learning and her beauty. He vowed she should not wed anyone but her superior in learning. The Rājā of Kāñchī's son obtained access to her, married her by the so-called 'Gāndharva'[13] rites[19]—which were just physical union, neither more nor less—and then publicly vanquished her (by her connivance) in learning. Rāmprasād's well-known contemporary, Bhāratchandra Ray, the rājkavi or kings poet of Kṛishṇagar, wrote a better poem with the same theme and title, his treatment being erotic and grossly indecent. Rāmprasād allegorises the story; even so, the poem is not one of which his admirers are proud.

But the Śākta poems are a different matter. These have gone to the heart of a people as few poets' work has done. Such songs as the exquisite 'This day will surely pass, Mother, this day will pass,' I have heard from coolies on the road or workers in the paddy fields; I have heard it by broad rivers at sunset, when the parrots were flying to roost and the village folk thronging from marketing to the ferry. Once I asked the top class in a mofussil[14] high school to write out a song of Rabindranath Tagore's; two boys out of forty succeeded, a result which I consider showed the very real diffusion of his songs. But, when I asked for a song of Rāmprasād's, every boy except two responded. Truly, a poet who is known both by work and name to boys between fourteen and eighteen, is a national poet. Tagore's songs are heard in Calcutta streets, and have been widely spread by the student community and the Brahmo Samaj; but in the villages of Bengal they are unknown, while Rāmprasād's are heard everywhere. 'The peasants and the paṇḍits enjoy his songs equally. They draw solace from them in the hour of despair and even at the moment of death. The dying man brought to the banks of the Ganges asks his companions to sing Rāmprasādī songs.'[15]

Sister Nivedita compared Rāmprasād with Blake. He resembles rather Herrick, in his self-consciousness and his habit of looking at himself from outside. But these are only casual and partial affinities. His lyrics at their simplest often have the quality of a snatch of [20]nursery babble, and sing themselves into the memory of an illiterate folk by a riot of punning sound and alliteration, a musical toss and play of similar syllables.[16] Rāmprasād took a childlike pleasure in these, and that untrained literary instinct out of which folklore and folksong are born, takes the same pleasure and has heard him with rapture. Much of his imagery is fanciful and conceited, and of anything but universal validity; yet even this has a charm, examined with patience and sympathy. The student of his poetry will be rewarded with a wealth of local thought and custom and of such stories as flower in the undergrowth and byways of authorised legend. This 'local habitation' of Rāmprasād's mind is strength as well as sometimes weakness. His range of ideas and illustrations is narrow; but within that range he is a master. If he falls short on occasion, because so much of Tantric teaching is puerile and worthless, he rises greatly again when he touches Earth, that Universal Mother. His illustration is racy, from the soil and of the soil; it comes from the life of an agricultural people. In Bengal, 'every schoolboy' (as a matter of plain, literal fact) knows his sublimely simple reproof to his soul, in a moment's shrinking from death, 'Thou, a snake, fearing frogs.'[17] This wealth of metaphor plucked from a simple life and society will meet the reader on every page. His mind has been a bad farmer;[18] he is treading the Round of Existence, like the blindfold ox that serves the oilman,[19] chained to 'the log' of the world; the Six Passions, like crocodiles[20] haunting the bathing ghāt, watch for his soul; or they are robbers, leaping over the mud wall of his courtyard;[21] or they are hired bullies with clubs,[22] like the ruffians kept by Bengali rājās and squires; they are cowardly boatmen, who forsake the soul when the tempest sweeps up life's river.[23] Once upon a time he had house and friends, he earned money and he was popular, but now he is a [21]beggar and forsaken.[24] Very often his thought turns to life's finish, when his friends will leave him, bones and ashes on the burning-ground.

It is profitable to study the attitude of the remarkable poets of the people, which every century has produced, in every part of India. Indian philosophy has reasoned out certain conclusions; its typical expression, as everyone knows, is the Vedānta; and no one would deny that even the thought of the illiterate has a pantheistic tinge. This has often been pointed out. Perhaps too much has been made of it; men forget how St. Paul confidently looked to find at least this tinge, alike in the thought of idlers in the market-place at Athens and in that of Lystra peasants. If we study the folk-poets, and through them the mental outlook of the simple folk of India, we find vulgar thought often in absolute revolt from those findings of the philosophers so readily and dogmatically put forth in Europe as Indian belief. These are only one side of Indian belief. Tennyson has not expressed more incisively than Rāmprasād the rejection, by the mind that has loved, of the doctrine of loss of personal life. What is the use of salvation to me, cries Rāmprasād, if it means absorption? 'I like eating sugar, but I have no desire to become sugar.'[25] No thought anywhere—aware as he was of Śaṅkarāchārya's monism and in sympathy as some of his moods show him to be with pantheistic teaching—is more emphatically theistic than his normally is, or rests more decidedly upon interchange and intercourse between a personal goddess and a personal suppliant and worshipper. With the popular religious idolatry, and especially its crudities and cruelties, he has no part. He scoffs at pilgrimage, and offerings to images. 'I laugh when I hear that a worshipper of Kālī has gone to Gayā.'[26] He is sturdily ethical, will have nothing to do with the suggestion that good and evil are the same thing, philosophically considered. He is terrified of those six passions who leap [22]over his life's low wall. In a passage famous with his countrymen, he looks past the blood-stained image which represents his 'Mother' to the many, sees with revolt the butchered victims and the red stains upon the flowers of worship, and cries out to that World-Mercy which he has found for himself and which he adores, that he will sacrifice not living, quivering flesh but the Six Passions, the sins of his heart and mind. This passage has never been forgotten by his countrymen; and, though some have disingenuously used it to buttress up the bloody system it condemns, representing their sacrifices as an acted allegory, the victims standing for the sins and passions, yet the naturally merciful thought of the most has seen his literal meaning, and has felt judged and unhappy, even though the slaughter may continue.

Living through that time of anarchy, when Bengal was at the mercy of thieves and oppressors of every race and sort, Rāmprasād kept his vision of Divine kindness, his trust in Divine love that was good despite all seeming. Kālī dancing on her lord, Kālī festooned with skulls, with lolling tongue black with blood, with dripping weapons uplifted and menacing eyes, is not a figure with which one would naturally associate such love as Rāmprasād's. Further, he was a Śākta, and practised the Śākta-yōga. But his poems leave the cruel, lustful side of Tantric worship on one side, their insistence on blood, especially human blood, and on intoxicating drink and the prostitution of maidenhood. His mind, when it touched upon the sterner aspects of the Śākta cult, leapt to those features that were sublime, though in lurid fashion. He saw Kālī in the red flames of the burning-ground, flickering and dancing in the breeze; in the flash of the lightning, or coming with the black, matted cloud-locks of the storm.[27] This terror, leading to imperfect trust, intrudes even into his love of Kālī as Mother. Though she beat it, he says, the child clings to its mother, crying Mother. Today the world's pain does not seem lightened if we [23]think of it as inflicted by a Hand external to it; our only hope is if we can see God identified with His children's sorrow. Of this conception there is no hint in Rāmprasād, and in this respect he falls short of the Musalman mystic who said, 'My Friend does me no wrong; the cup which he gives me to drink he has drunk before me,' or of the Tamil Māṇikka Vāsahar, who loved Śiva because

[28]'Thou drankest poison black, the humbler beings pitying, That I, thy meanest one, might find no poison, but a nectar fount.'

His mood is too monotonously one of complaint; it is that of a grey experience, with little hope or sunlight. Yet how much of purity and tenderness is in his songs! 'What folly is this in thee, the child of the Mother-Heart of All, fearing death! Thou, a snake, afraid of frogs!' Least of all should any Christian dare to marvel at the mercy which reached this man through such paths. For God, says St. John, is love. And love, says an old song, will find out the way.

The best edition of Rāmprasād, issued by the Basumatī; office, Calcutta, contains 226 songs. This collection is far from complete; nor is the text authoritative. Tests of genuineness are various, mention of his name in the poem and the poem's setting to the 'Rāmprasādī' tune being chief. Some undoubtedly authentic songs exist both with and without his name; it is likely, then, that his name was sometimes added by other hands. Among our translations, we have included as his nearly a dozen songs that are not in the Basumatī; collection; also, the fuller and more picturesque text of No. VII, which may possibly be a later writing-up. We have added another four songs—Nos. LXVI-LXIX—after those which we believe to be his; they are part of the extensive and hitherto unexamined Rāmprasād 'apocrypha.' They are often printed as his, and may be.

[24]

Later Śākta poetry imitates Rāmprasād a great deal. Kamalākānta Bhaṭṭāchārya came close to him in point of time, living in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. Nothing much seems to be known of him; he removed from Ambikānagar, in the Khulnā district, to Kōtālhāṭā, in the Burdwan district, in 1800, and he was the religious preceptor of the Mahārājā of Burdwan. His Śākta poetry does not appear to deserve its reputation; out of his many songs we have given four. One of the best Śākta poets was Nīlakaṇṭha Mukhopādhyāya, a native of the village of Dharaṇī, in the Burdwan district, a district that has been a nurse of poets. Nīlakaṇṭha was a good singer, leader of a jātrā (yātrā) [29] which was very popular in West Bengal, thirty years ago. He was the author of numerous Vaishṇava and of over a hundred Śākta songs; these are sung throughout the Burdwan, Bankurā and Birbhum districts. The reader will notice that No. LXXVIII is modern in tone, influenced by the teaching of Rāmkṛishṇa Paramhaṁsa, that all worshipped gods are the same. Nīlakaṇṭha died aged sixty; but no one apparently knows the dates of his birth or death, though many people now living met him, and his memory is cherished as that of a very simple-minded and attractive man. Of the poets represented in this book by one poem only, Mahārājā Rāmkṛishṇa, of Naṭōr, is the earliest; he was a contemporary of Rāmprasād. Rasikchandra Rāy (1820-1893), a voluminous writer of songs for jātrās, composed the well-known song which is No. LXXVI of this book. Rāmchandra Datta (1861-1899), author of No. LXXXI, was a doctor on the staff of the Medical College, Calcutta. In 1879, he began to visit Rāmkṛishṇa Paramhaṁsa, and joined his movement. By his extensive practice and his salary as a professor, he made a large income, most of which he spent in religious works.

The vast Śākta literature is monotonous with its four or five themes—Kālī's neglect of her votary, Śiva's [25]carelessness, the poet's threatened law-suits or desertion of the Mother, the Mother's absorption in her wild, destructive dance, her standing over 'the Lord of Death.' The Calcutta theatre has kept up, along with worse things, the vernacular tradition of piety, and Vaishṇava and Śākta songs find their way from the boards into remote villages, the gramophone being the effective agent in this dispersal. An excellent example of the modern spirit at work is provided by No. LXXXVIII. The author is a baul. Bauls are mendicant religious singers, often almost unlettered (though the author of No. LXXXVIII can hardly be that). The reader will note the echo of Rāmprasād's protest against sacrifices. But this comes with a new tenderness—the dumb victims are 'the Mother's children.' The poet's thought takes a larger sweep, for he belongs to the present, whose instincts and practice are both (whatever pessimists may allege) more compassionate than any former age has known. The song's atmosphere and teaching reflect the merciful and ethical theism which is today overspreading all lands; Its Bengali differentia is that it looks towards the motherhood, and not the fatherhood, of God.

This song fitly concludes our Śākta selection, carrying the thought of Rāmprasād into the world of today. It is followed by fifteen Āgāmanī; and Vijayā; songs, taken from different writers and arranged to form a drama of welcome and farewell. Two new writers of importance appear in this section. Dāśarathī Rāy, born at Bandāmura in the Burdwan district in 1804, died in 1857. He enjoyed immense popularity, most of his verses being improvised before delighted crowds. By his very clever and very indecent poetry, he made a considerable fortune. He was in the old vernacular tradition, untouched by English influence. No. XCIX, a beautiful song, shows him at his best. Rajanikānta Sen was born in 1865; he practised as a pleader at Rajshahi; and died in the Medical College, Calcutta, of cancer. His Agāmanī poems were composed during his last illness, and published posthumously.

[26]

The theme and occasion of Āgāmanī and Vijayā songs are as follows. Umā or Gaurī, daughter of Himālaya and Menakā, was married to Śiva, the Lord of Kailāsa, at the age of eight. The fable has had this unfortunate consequence, that every attempt to raise the legal age for marriage has been opposed by conservative Hindus with the cry of 'Gaurī dān,' 'The giving of Gaurī,' and a peculiar blessing has been asserted to rest upon a girl's marriage at the age of eight. But it has also furnished an outlet for the loneliness and grief of parents mourning their daughters gone from them so early, who have found their own sorrow mirrored in the legendary sorrow of the Great Goddess's parents. Dr. Dinesh Sen says, speaking of of the marriage of very young girls to old men,[30] the situation created pathos too deep for expression. This situation, he suggests, is the real theme of the Āgāmanī poets. 'There are innumerable songs in Bengali, describing the pathetic situation. The domestic scenes of Bengal—the sorrows of Bengali parents—are really the themes of the songs, though they profess to deal with mythological subjects.... The girls here, of too tender an age to play the wife, are often taken away from the custody of parents. With veils over their faces, they have to stay in their husband's home, speak in whispers and subject themselves to the painful discipline of the daughter-in-law.... When the Āgāmanī songs, describing the sorrows of Menakā and of Umā, her daughter, are sung by professional singers, the eyes of many a child-wife glisten behind her veil, and the hearts of their mothers cry out for the daughters who have been taken away from them.'[31]

The Durgā-pūjā falls in late September or October. Some fifteen days before, Āgāmanī or 'advent' songs are heard everywhere. The pūjā begins on the sixth day of the moon, when Umā (Durgā) revisits her parents for three days. Those parents have discovered that their son-in-law, the Lord of Kailāsa, is a [27]drug-eating vagabond, a haunter of waste places where dead men's bones lie; and their hearts go out in overflowing and distressed love to their child, returning to them, as once Persephone to Demeter from the gloomy throne of her dark consort. The whole pūjā is a very happy time, the Bengali Christmas. Small boys explode fireworks incessantly, to their own immense joy and the good-humoured annoyance of passers-by. There is feasting and reunion everywhere.

In these songs, the sorrows of Umā have passed away, from the region of religion, into that of poetry. Many of them are of great beauty; the reader will be struck by the way in which the goddess has been taken into the family and inner domesticities of the Bengali home. She has been adopted as a kind of divine daughter; and the incidents of her history with her strange Lord are told with a straightforward simplicity that is often delightful. This is carried even further in a number of songs (of which we give examples), which are not Āgāmanī songs, strictly speaking, but closely akin to them. Of these, a few deal with Umā's Lord, yet chiefly as being her Lord and not for his own sake. There is no such extensive Śiva-literature in Bengal as we find in South India; his consort, in her various manifestations, has largely absorbed his cult or attached it to her own. But there is at least one voluminous and very popular Śiva-poem, the Śivāyana by Rāmeśwara, written about 1750. In this, and in other poems of this class, Śiva's life in Kailāsa is shown. 'Umā in Kailāsa plays the house wife, the perfect prototype of the Hindu wife, ever accustomed to patient and strenuous self-denial and labour, cheerfully borne for the sake of others. Her highest delight lies in distributing food to her husband, children and servants.[32] Dr. Sen translates (or, rather, paraphrases) a passage from the Śivāyana:

'With his two sons Śiva sits down to dine. Three sit to eat, and Umā serves food to them.[33] As soon as [28]she has served food, the plates are emptied, and they look into the cooking-pot. Padmāvatī[34] observes how eagerly Śiva eats, and smiles. Śukta[35] is finished, and they fall upon broth. Meantime the plates are all emptied of rice, and they all want more. "Mother!" says Kārttika, "Give us rice!" and Gaṇeśa also repeats the request, while the Lord of Destruction says, "O Umā, bring more rice."... Umā smiles, and distributes rice. Gaṇeśa says, "I have finished my curry, what more have you in store?" Hastily she comes, and serves ten different kinds of dried food. Śiva is much pleased, and praises her for her good cooking. The fried dhutarā[36] fruit and cups of siddhi[36] are given to the Great God, and he nods his head in approval as he sips. When all the curries are finished, they all call at the same time for more.... She finds it hard to serve so many.... She next serves pudding of pleasant flavour, and then a sauce both sweet and sour. Her hair becomes dishevelled, and her dress grows loose. With sweetmeats of milk and rice, the dinner ends.'[37]

On the tenth day of the moon, the images of Durgā are thrown into the water, and people go from house to house, greeting their friends. This is the Vijayā;[38] milana, or 'meeting together in victory,' festival. Vijayā songs, bidding farewell to Umā, who has already [29]left her mountain home, and whose image now leaves the homes of the people, are sung; these are far fewer than Āgāmanī songs. What the festival means to Hindus is thus expressed by a leading article this year (1922) in the Amṛitā Bāzār Patrikā;, the most popular nationalist paper in Bengal. 'The spirit of Bijayā [ i.e. Vijayā] means the spirit of peace and goodwill. On the day the image of the Goddess Durgā is immersed, the Hindu is required to immerse all unkindly and uncharitable feelings. He meets relations and friends, and makes peace with enemies on this day; the custom of the country is for everyone to salute his elders, to bless youngers, and to embrace whoever comes across him. As man is a quarrelsome being, naturally more or less spiteful and selfish, he is enjoined to make an effort on this sacred day to forget and forgive and make peace even with his bitterest foes.

'Each day of the Pūjā is a day of sacrifice; for the way to resurrection lies through the Cross, the road to higher life lies through a sacrifice of the lower. The extent of our sacrifice is the measure of our spiritual uplift, and this self-immolation is necessary that the lower gross vehicle may be purified of its dross and transformed into a fit instrument of the Divine Energy....

'Once a year, on the sacred Bijayā day, let us anticipate this final transformation of humanity [ i.e. into holiness of life and heart]; let us forget our petty jealousies and antagonisms, and realise that we are one in the bosom of the Universal Mother in whom all things live, move and have their being!'

On the next new moon night, the Kālī-pūjā is held. The dualism which overlies Hindu monism is expressed in these two festivals; Durgā (Umā) represents the beneficent face of Nature, Kālī the maleficent; and they are associated respectively with the bright and dark phases of the moon. Kālī's ritual is more rigid, and, so far as we can discover, it is not lawful to offer her bloodless sacrifices.

The reader will note the resemblances between the[30] Bengali 'drama of coming and going' and song-cycles of other lands. One thinks of the chorus of Canticles giving notice of the imminence of the kingly lover's arrival; or of peasant songs of Greece and Italy. Village poets are still improvising new details or embroidering old ones on the tale of Umā's sorrowful life with her vagabond husband, of her mother's joy at receiving her, and her grief at losing her. Though the Durgā-cult has annexed this legend, it has very different roots. Umā has the breath of Himālayan snows about her—still more, has the fragrance of autumn harvest fields in her hair—while Kālī and Durgā, especially Kālī, are children of a fierce, savage imagination, nurtured in jungle fastnesses.

E. J. T.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Farquhar, Outline of the Religious Literature of India, passim. For much of this and the next paragraph, I have taken this book as my authority.

[2] IV, vii.

[3] Farquhar, op. cit., 150.

[4] Tattva means the underlying truth or substance.

[5] See No. XXX of this Book.

[6] Outline of the Religious Literature of India, pp. 203-4.

[7] Conversation.

[8] Suttees.

[9] The physician caste.

[10] See No. LXV.

[11] Kīrtan means a processional song or hymn. Two pieces from the Kālīkīrtan (LXXXIX and XC) are given in this book.

[12] Her name was Vidyā;(learning) and her lover's Sundara (beautiful).

[13] The marriage which took place between Dushyanta and Sakuntalā, in Kālidāsa's play, and between Arjuna and Chītraṇ̣gadā, in Tagore's.

[14] Roughly rural as opposed to urban or metropolitan. Anglicized in India, and spelt accordingly by me.

[15] Dr. Sen, in a letter to me.

[16] This, of course, cannot be kept in translation.

[17] No. XLII.

[18] No. XXVIII.

[19] No. XXIX.

[20] No. XXX.

[21] No. XXXII.

[22] No. XXI.

[23] No. XXXIV.

[24] No. XX.

[25] No. XV.

[26] Ibid.

[27] See Sen, p. 715.

[28] Hymns of Tamil Śaivite Saints, Kingsbury and Phillips.

[29] Travelling theatrical party.

[30] History of Bengali Language and Literature, p. 841.

[31] Ibid., p. 243, Dr. Sen's book is a mine of delightful reading.

[32] Sen, p. 246.

[33] Literally, 'Satī'—'The faithful wife,' here used as a name of Umā—'serves the food alone.'

[34] Umā's maid-servant.

[35] The first curry.

[36] The narcotics to which Śiva is addicted. Dhutarā; (more correctly, dhutūrā) is datura; Siddhi is cannabis sativa.

[37] Sen, pp. 247-48.

[38] From Vijayā, Victory. But no one seems to know why the festival has this name. It is by some connected with Rāma's victory over Rāvana, after worshipping Durgā; by some with Durgā's own victory over the demon Mahishāsura. Neither explanation is convincing. Dr. Farquhar writes: 'In both the hymns to Durgā in the Mahābhārata she is called Jayā and Vijayā and in the hymn in the Harivaṁśa, in which she is addressed as Āryā;, the same epithets are applied to her. From the time of the Mārkaṇḍeya Puraṇa, Jayā and Vijayā are the names of Chaṇḍī's chief maids. Clearly Vijayā;, originally, had no relation to the fight with Mahisha, whatever the idea may have been. Jayā and Vijayā; differ no more than Victrix and Victoria. How the festival got its name, I do not know.'

 

[31]

RĀMPRASĀD SEN

I. THE CHILD'S COMPLAINT OF HIS MOTHER'S NEGLECT

Tell me where I may stand, Mother Tārā.[39] I am alone, O Saṅkarī.[40] A mother's love brings the father's with it. But the father who dallies with a stepmother,[41] vainly does his child look to him. If you forget all kindness, shall I go to my stepmother? If a stepmother take me in her lap, will my mind's disquiet cease?[42]

Prasād says: In our scriptures this is written. He that names your name, Mother, wins for reward a garland of bones, and robes in tatters.

FOOTNOTES:

[39] Star; a name of Kālī.

[40] Śaṅkarī: Wife of Śaṅkara ('He who does good,' Śiva).

[41] Literally, 'The father who holds a stepmother on his head.' The reference is to 'Śiva,' who, in the purāṇic mythology, broke the fall of the Ganges from heaven to earth, by receiving the flood on his matted hair. Ganges becomes also co-wife with Kālī. So Rāmprasād says: Śiva's affections wander and are divided, and the worshipper of Kālī cannot look to Kālī's lord for affection, which he has given elsewhere.

[42] There are variant readings of most of Rāmprasād's poems, for they have gone from mouth to mouth for a century and a half, long before they were printed. In this line, we have taken the most intelligible reading.