Dear Reader,
“Amar santan jeno thake dudhe bhate” (May my child live in milk and rice)
This humble hope is expressed by a boatwoman, Ishwari Patni, when the goddess Annapurna asks her to make a wish in Annada Mangal Kabya, a Bengali narrative poem written by Bharatchandra Ray in 1752-53. The long poem, belonging to the genre of Mangal Kabyas, is a eulogy to Annapurna, who is a form of Parvati worshipped in Bengal. The profound simplicity of Ishwari’s wish has made her statement iconic: it is still used to suggest a middle-class mother’s eternal concern that her children live in relative prosperity, if not in riches.
The line also gives a taste of the homely flavour of the Mangal Kabyas in general—a significant category of medieval Bengali literature that was meant to validate the worship of indigenous deities by tracing their lineage to Puranic divinities, and giving them a mythology of miraculous tales that demonstrated their might. Written between the 13th and 18th centuries, there are Mangal Kabyas in praise of Chandi (also a form of Parvati), Manasa (the snake goddess), Dharmaraj (a local version of Yama), Annapurna (referred to above), and others. Recently, I came across an excellent translation of Chandimangal by Edward M. Yazijian (Penguin Books, 2015) that gestures in its unpretentious charm at the bewitching quality of the Bengali original by Mukundaram Chakravarti (c. 1500-1551).
The Chandi of Chandimangal is surprisingly human, perhaps because here the goddess is at the mercy of the humans whose allegiance she seeks. She often makes strategic mistakes, corrects them, gets into destructive fits, manipulates her human subjects like a soap opera vamp, changes her mind freely, and chuckles dramatically when pleased with herself. As her devotee, a woman named Khullana, tells her, “I know that my husband is badly behaved but you personify both good and bad natures. Bad and good are all your illusion, so banish both!”
The 16th century text reads like an engaging piece of contemporary speculative fiction with its delightful combination of fantasy and realism. The human characters regularly launch into complaints about the hardships of the seasons—the intense summer heat, the relentless monsoon rains, the bone-chilling cold of winter. The well-observed realistic details firmly plant the poem in our everyday world. For instance, when the abused wife Khullana complains to her husband, Dhanapati, about how she is mistreated by the co-wife: “Lahana gives me an old sack to wear. As I put it on, I am covered with dust from the old sack” (my italics, from the website, Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800). Chandi, as an extension of this world, is accessible, understanding, a people’s goddess. This, if nothing else, justifies her worship.
The Hindi poet Tulsidas (c. 1511–1623) was roughly a contemporary of Mukundaram. If his Ramcharitmanas, a retelling of the Sanskrit Ramayana in Hindi/ Awadhi, is a living presence even today that is chiefly because it too, like Chandimangal, makes the epic hero, Ram, and his family, touchingly human. Tulsidas’ other great work is the Hanuman Chalisa, an age-old text embedded in the Indian psyche for generations. Reciting the Hanuman Chalisa is said to give the devotee courage and strength in the same way as performing the Mangal Kabyas is said to bring spiritual and material prosperity. Hanuman, like Chandimangal’s Chandi, is characterised by accessibility. Loyal, brave, and a diligent body-builder, he embodies the qualities we want, and can easily have, if we are sincere enough. He is a friendly god.
In his brilliant review of Vikram Seth’s translation of the Hanuman Chalisa, the poet Vivek Narayanan writes: “Why do we love Hanuman so? It is an almost impossible question to answer, for which one would have to travel deep in our subconscious and sense of relation—think of Jeffrey Masson’s Hanuman as an imaginary friend—through reams and reams of philosophy, Hanuman’s role as the ultimate devotee, and also the long legacy of the ‘monkey mind’, which is our human mind, in thought and epic all across Asia.”
The Hanuman Chalisa, with lines like, “You [Hanuman] are an ardent listener, always so keen to listen to the narration of Shri Ram’s life stories” (fancy a listener among all the self-absorbed gods!), endures partly because it is immediately relatable. Incidentally, Hanuman makes sudden appearances in Chandimangal, where he uncomplainingly performs the tasks Chandi asks of him (like destroying the boats of non-believers, tearing down trees, creating mayhem) and then quietly disappears.
If you feel like engaging with some very human gods, then these two could be a good place to start. I will leave you to this pleasant task and see you again soon.
Anusua Mukherjee
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