The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s6.10

c14.s6.10

Perhaps after the *Rāmāyaṇa* of Krittivāsa (c. 1450) no Bengali poetical work is more popular than Mukundarāma's *Kavikankaṇa-Chaṇḍī* (c. 1589), already referred to several times. This work *pro forma* should appear to be a treatise on *Chaṇḍī* the Mother, and therefore something like a contribution to religious poetry. But one has only to open the work, available in print, at any page and be convinced that no literary work in any language is more profane, secular and worldly than this Bengali composition, written as it is with the object of propagating the cult of Kālī. Every line in it breathes the spirit of living human beings, their daily exploits and ambitions, their hatreds and quarrels, their joys and sorrows. Mukundarāma is the poet *par excellence* of man's mastery over the things of this Earth, and the prophet born to accord an “Everlasting Yea” to life. It is of life and the world that he sings, of men and women in action and in struggle. He has furnished the Bengali masses with the well of *śaktiyoga* (energism), pure and undefiled. It is for a dose of inspiration in human endeavours and for the sunny atmosphere of human humour that one turns to this apostle of humanism in the sixteenth century.