Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c11.s1.2

c11.s1.2

The movement, thus, permanently enshrined itself in the abundant and versatile literature it produced. In its earlier stages, with which we are directly concerned here, this literature expressed itself chiefly in Sanskrit, and took various forms. The only Bengali Caitanyaite productions of this period comprise a number of Bengali songs and lyrics (Padas) and the biographical and narrative works, of which we have already given a brief account¹. There can be no doubt that they constitute one of the most important and influential aspects of its literary energy : for both lyric and biography are distinctly new literary *genres*, which Caitanyaism created for the first time in Middle Bengali, and through which its passionate appeal spread widely and rapidly. But even allowing that the best mediaeval Bengali biographical records belong to this period, the really creative epoch of the resplendent Bengali song and lyric, inspired by Caitanyaism, comes a little later¹. At the same time, the purely literary efforts of Caitanyaism in Sanskrit are by no means negligible. While its attempts in biography and narrative are represented in Sanskrit by the works of Murāri-gupta and Paramānanda Kavikarṇapūra, the richer emotional and poetical sensibilities of this movement, which exalted emotion over reason and fancy over fact, are expressed in a series of mystically, but gorgeously, impassioned stories, poems, dramas, Campūs, lyrics, hymns, songs, and panegyrics composed by Kavikarṇapūra, Rāmānanda-rāya, Raghunātha-dāsa, Rūpa, Jīva, Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja and others, as well as by a host of minor poets, whose devotional verses are collected together in Rūpa's anthological survey of the Padyāvalī. It would seem, therefore, that the religious revival must have supplied an emotional inflatus which produced wonderful results in Bengali poetry for more than a century, but it also led to a fervent expression of devout feelings even through the more difficult, but perhaps more rich, medium of Sanskrit.