Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/839

 VI.) BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 497 2. Satya Pir by Ramananda. ° Gy satya bir by Cankaracharyya written in 1636 A.D.* A complete Ms. of this poem has been re- covered by Babu Nagendra Nath Vasu from Mayur- bhanja. It is a voluminous work and is divided into 15 chapters. The book discloses a curious fact about the origin of the god Satya Pir. It isa legendary account, but by comparison with the story in another work on Satya Pir by Nayek Mayaj Gaji, we glean the fact that the Emperor Hosen Shah of Gauda who tried to ensure the good will of his Hindu subjects, was the originator of the ‘Satya Pir-cult, which made Hindus and Mahom- edans join hands in worshipping a common God. Though in Orissa Satya Narayanaand Satya Pir are reckoned as the same God, they do not appear to be identical in Bengal. ‘There is not a village in Ben- gal where Satya Narayana is not worshipped once evey week, but in these pujas the Mahomedans do not join with the Hindus. Poems on Satya Narayana are to numerous to be mentioned here, as there is hardly a village in Bengal in which there is not a poem on the God ; they scarcely deserve any notice being generally very short. We have quite a heap of Mss. on the subject giving short stories to illustrate the might and the. grace of the deity: but none of them has risen to the dignity of a poem except the Hari Lila by Jaya Narayana and Ananda Mayi about which we have already written, on pages 683-687. Amongst these Mss. we may mention one by Kavi Chandra containing a description of a river trip from Hugli to the Bay of Bengal with short notices of the