Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c11.s4.2

c11.s4.2

We have already noted that these devotional poems, dramas and Campūs of Caitanyaism give expression to a phase of the mediaeval Bhakti movement which was essentially emotional, and base the religious sentiment, mystically, upon the exceedingly familiar and authentic intensity of transfigured sex-passion. There can be no doubt that such an attitude brings about a new development in Sanskrit religious poetry, which had hitherto confined itself to a more staid and sober kind of speculative emotion, and relate it very closely to erotic poetry. This is done to such an extent that poems like Jayadeva's *Gita-govinda* would appear, from different aspects, both as a religious and an erotic work. The new standpoint vivified religion, as well as its poetry, with a human element by lifting one of the most powerful impulses of the human mind into a means of glorious exaltation. It involved an assertion of the emotional and aesthetic in human nature against the hard intellectuality of dry dogmas and doctrines. But we have also seen that the new movement, in its turn, created its own dogmas and doctrines; and if its ecstatic emotional inclination precluded intellectual virility, it was certainly marked by great intellectual subtlety, which was characteristic of the scholastic age. Along with its philosophy and theology, the sectarian devotionalism elaborated its appropriate system of emotional analysis, its refinements of psychology and poetics, its subtleties of phraseology, imagery and conceits. As the sentiment of Bhakti or religious devotion is approximated to the sentiment of literary relish,¹ called Rasa, the whole apparatus of Alaṃkāra, as well as of Kāma-śāstra, and their technicalities are ingeniously utilised and exalted. The new application becomes novel, intimate and inspiring; and the erotic sensibility in its devotional ecstacy often rises above the formalism of its rhetorical and psychological banalities, of its metaphysical and theological niceties. But this is more true of the detached poems and Stotras, of which we shall speak presently and which perhaps afford greater scope for personal feeling, than of the artificially sustained Kāvya works, with which we are at present concerned, and which conform deliberately not only to their own mass of newly created conventionalities, but also to the entire literary resources of the older traditional Kāvya technique in their method, manner, form and diction.