July, 1873.] VAISHNAVA POETS OF BENGAL. 187 place be got of all of which the value is not known; where these were good, if the inscrip¬ tion were worth publication, they would only require to be transferred and printed; where they were unsatisfactory, but the inscription of apparent interest, a trained hand could be sent to obtain a faithful facsimile by the process best suited to the circumstances of the case. It may be safely asserted that, had the money spent on inscriptions during the last ten years been judiciously employed in this way, we should now have had a body of inscriptions equal in execution to any ever published, and consider¬ ably more numerous than the total of those on which so much has been almost uselessly spent. THE EARLY VAISHNAVA POETS OF BENGAL. II.—OHANDf DAS. BY JOHN BEAMES, Next in rank to Bidyapati comes Chan¬ di Das, who though older in age did not begin to write so early as his brother-poet. He was a Barendro Brahman, and was bom in A.D. 1417 at Nadur, a village near the Thana of Sukalipfir, in the present British District of Birbhdm in Western Bengal, which lies about forty miles to the north-west of the celebrated town of N a d i y a (Nuddea). He was at firat a £ a k t a or worshipper of the &akti or female procreative energy typified by the goddess DurgA, wife of Siva, one of whose names, Chandi, or the “enraged,” he bears. The particular idol affected by this sect is termed B a s u 1 i, and was probably a non-Aryan divinity adopt¬ ed by the Aryan colonies in Bengal. Her rude woodland temples are found still in the mountains and submontane jungles of Western Bengal, and all down the hill-ranges of Orissa, and I have even met with them on the Suban- rekha, and along the coast of the Bay of Bengal. A fine Sanskrit name has been fitted to this wild forest divinity, and she is called by the Brahmans VisalAkshi, or the “ large-eyed her statues represent her holding in her up¬ lifted arms two elephants, from whose trunks water pours on to her head. In the rustic vil¬ lage shrines in her honour one sees masses of small figures of elephants made of earth, baked by the village potters and offered by women; heaps of these little figures, all more or less smashed and mutilated, surround the shrine, where stands a figure once perhaps distinguish¬ able as that of a human being, but so smeared with oil and encrusted with repeated coatings of vermilion as to have lost all shape or recog¬ nizable details. One of these temples is said to B.O.S., M.R.AS., &c. be still standing in the village of Naddr, where our poet was bom and lived. The date of his conversion to Vaislinavismis not known, but he died in 1478, in the sixty-second year of his age. His conversion and subsequent conduct appears to have made his native place too hot to hold him, for he passed the latter years of his life at Chatera, a village far to the south in the present district of Bankura. After he became a Vaishnava, he thought it necessary to provide himself with a Vaishnav!, and selected for this purpose a woman named R A n fl, of the dhobi or washerman caste, a proceeding which must have given grave offence to his orthodox kin¬ dred, and is remarkable as showing that the ob¬ literation of the distinctions of caste, so charac¬ teristic of early Vaishnavism, had come into existence before the times ofChaitanya, and that he, like so many other popular reformers, did not so much originate, as concentrate and elevate into doctrine, an idea which had long been vaguely floating and gaining force in the minds of his countrymen. Chandi Das and his contemporary B i d- y A p a t i were acquainted with each other, and the Pada-kalpataru contains some poems (2409- 2415) descriptive of their meeting on the banks of the Ganges and singing songs in praise of Radha and Krishna together. The style of the two poets is very much alike, but there is perhaps more sweetness and lilt in BidyApati. Favourable spe¬ cimens ofCha^diDAs are the following :— I. , Krishna’s Chief.* Se je nAgsra gunadhama Japaye tohAri nAma, &unite tohAri bAta
- In the transliteration the guttural nasal is written n, the palatal fi, the cerebral p, and the anuswAra n. In old Beng&li
the two former are of frequent occurrence, representing respectively ng and ny. The ordinary dental n is not marked.
