Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/81

II.] Lāu-Sen to go to Hākanda and fulfil certain extraordinary conditions for the propitiation of the god Dharma. These involved a severe course of penances, and required that the prince should make the sun rise from the west. If he should not be able to satisfy the King by this, he was to lose his head. When Lāu Sen had gone to Hākanda on this strange mission, Māhudya led an army to Maynā-gaḍa and laid siege to his capital. The brave and heroic sacrifices of Lokhā Dumānī, wife of Kālu Doma, and those of his son Çaka, with the wonderful spirit of devotion to truth shown by Kālu in the sacrifice of his life at this crisis,—are graphically described by all the poets of Dharma-maṅgala. The trials and temptations which beset Lāu Sen in his early youth,—the court of Surikshya, the coquettish queen,—the manners of Nayānī, the lewd Vārui woman, are all full of interest for us as shedding light on various points of domestic and court-life as it prevailed in the Bengal of those days. Lāu Sen eventually comes out triumphant, by the favour of Dharma, and by dint of his wonderful devotion and strength of character.

Such, briefly, is the subject-matter of the Dharmamaṅgal-poems. The subject is an historical one. The ruins of Lāu Sen's palace may still be seen at Maynā-gaḍa in Tamaluk. The fort of the great Ichhāi Ghoṣa, who offered a fierce resistance to the Emperor of Gauḍa in the 11th century, is also lying in ruins on the banks of the Ajay in the district of Bānkurā. The temple of Kāli called Çyāmrupā, worshipped by Ichhāi, is also to be seen in that place, which is still full of the tradition of the prowess and heroic deeds of the glorious rebel.