Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c11.s5.1

c11.s5.1

Like the regular Vaiṣṇava Kāvya, the Vaiṣṇava Stotra marks a departure from the staid and elevated tradition¹ of the reflective Stotras, of which the Vedāntic hymns ascribed to Śaṃkara may be taken as the type, by their erotic-mystic sensibility and by their more passionate and sensuous content and expression. If the traditional Stotra as poems of praise and panegyric derived its impetus from speculative thought, the quasi-amorous attitude of the Vaiṣṇava Bhakti movement shifted the basis of inspiration by transforming the mighty sex-impulse into an ecstatic religious emotion, and by relating the devotional literature very closely to the erotic; the religious longings being expressed in the intimate language and imagery of earthly passion. The apotheosis of the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa legend, with all its paraphernalia of impassioned beatific sports, was, no doubt, a literary gain of immense importance and lifted the devotional literature from the dead level of speculative thought to the romantic richness of an intensely passionate experience. But very soon subtle scholasticism laid its cold dry fingers upon the spontaneous blooming, not only of the regular Vaiṣṇava Kāvya but also of the devotional Vaiṣṇava Stotra; and the incubus of a long-established literary tradition retarded the growth of independent form and expression. As a result, rhetorical nicety and psychological refinement came to dominate. The technical analysis and authority of the older Poetics and Erotics had already evolved a system of meticulous classification of the ways, means and effects of the erotic sentiment, and established a series of rigid conventionalities to be expressed in stock poetic and emotional phrases, analogies and conceits. To add to this, the neo-vaiṣṇava theology and theory of sentiment brought in a further mass of well defined subtleties and elegancies. Neither the regular Vaiṣṇava Kāvya nor the Stotra could, therefore, escape refined artificiality* of sentiment and expression, as well as inevitable monotony arising from similar themes and motifs, similar series of words and ideas and similar method and treatment.