Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c11.s5.3

c11.s5.3

The Bengal Vaiṣṇava Stotra, therefore, exhibits practically the same set of characteristics as the regular Vaiṣṇava Kāvya which we have reviewed above, and they are also composed by the same set of writers with similar prepossessions. If the Stotra springs from a more personal religious consciousness and is not weighted entirely by the dry dogmatism of mere scholastic thought, the expression is too conventionally artistic and too subtly saturated with studied erotic niceties. In spite of the emotional inflatus, they are deliberate works with all the distinctive features of deliberate art. Nevertheless, the Stotras are comparatively short pieces and are generally not so dull and dreary as the laboured and extensive Kāvya. We often find in them a rare and pleasing charm, a luscious exuberance of pictorial fancy and a mood of sensuous sentimentality, which we often miss in the more ambitious and leisurely composed Kāvyas of massively erudite fancy. It is true that the reality of the personal emotion is too often lost in the repetition of conventional ideas and imageries, but the spring and resonance of the verses and the swing and smoothness of the comparatively facile diction, as well as the inherent passion and picturesqueness of the romantic content, frequently make these devotional efforts transcend the mere formalism of literary and emotional trivialities. According as the sentiment gains in ardour and the expression in concreteness, theology and rhetoric recede to background; but, at the same time, it must be admitted that it is not very often that these poems of adoration and eulogy rise above the level of modest mediocrity.