Page:Bengali Religious Lyrics, Śākta.pdf/26

16 village two miles from the main river, living in security all these years, beside its 'blind river,' will wake at midnight to find a shoreless sea heaving and thrusting at the mud walls. This experience may be repeated, not once, but often in one Rains, as if Nature were an ogress, watching till the folk had put together some makeshift shelter of palm-leaves and mud, to dash it to ground again. So the long, bitter fight goes on. The people, after centuries of this, have become patient, uncomplaining, hopeless. I am speaking of the villages. It was in the villages that Rāmprasād and the poet of Chaṇḍi lived: Calcutta is a different world. But there come years when Nature seems caressing, indeed a Mother; when the rain is neither too much nor too little, but just sufficient. The fields are filled, the mud huts stand. It is not strange that Bengal should think of God as a Mother; yet, as Rāmprasād's songs show, should think of her with fear, as capricious and some times terribly cruel. It is to this Mother that the Śākta-poets have turned; for, as Ramprasad reminds us frequently, her lord is Bhōlānātha, lord of forgetfulness,' the God who wanders abstractedly or sinks into meditation. There is little chance of help in him. Śākti has all his dreadful power, and her energy is unsleeping.

Not much is known of Rāmprasād. He was born at Kumārhātī, near Halisahar, in 1718. His birthplace is within the old bounds of Nadiyā, a district which is the very heart and metropolis of Bengal's life and history. From here it was that Lakshmaṇ Sen, its last independent king, fled before the Musalmans; it was in this district that the great court of the Rajas of Krishṇagar, centuries later, kept art and poetry alive Śileidā, the favourite retreat of Bengal's most famous poet today, is in Nadiyā.

Rāmprasād was the son of Rāmrām Sen. His descendants today are Vaidyas by caste, and in his poems he refers to himself as a Vaidya; but it has sometimes been asserted that he was a Brahmin. He