Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kali and Uma in the Devotional Poetry of BengalThis book chronicles the rise of goddess worship in the region of Bengal from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Focusing on the goddesses Kali and Uma, McDermott examines lyrical poems written by devotees from Ramprasad Sen (ca. 1718-1775) to Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976). |
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Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kālī and Umā in the Devotional ... Rachel Fell McDermott No preview available - 2001 |
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Andul anthologies Bandyopadhyay Basu Bengali Literature bhakti Bhattacarya Bhuluya biographical Brahman British Burdwan cakra Cakrabarti Calcutta Canna cassettes Cattopadhyay chapter composed contemporary context corpus Dasarathi Datta death deity Delhi depictions devotional dhyanas Durga Puja eighteenth estates example famous festival genre Ghos Goddess guru Halisahar Hindu History ibid India Isvarcandra Gupta kabioyalas Kali Puja Kali's Kashi Kotalhat Krishnanagar Krsna kundalim yoga kundalinT legends literary Maharaja Krsnacandra Ray Maharaja Nandakumar Mahtabcand malakanta Marathas meditation Menaka Mitra Mother Mughal Nadia Najrul nawabs nineteenth century PadabalT patron poems poetic poetry popular Prasad Pratapcand Premik Purana rajas Ramkrsna Ramprasad and Kamalakanta Ramprasad Sen references religious ritual Sadhak Kamalakanta sahasrara Sahgit Sahitya Sakta padas Sakta Padavali Sakta poets Sakti Sanskrit singers singing Siva social spiritual stories sung Syama Tantra Tantric Tara Tejascand Thakur themes tion tradition Uma's Vaisnava vijaya women worship zamindars
Popular passages
Page 21 - Sacking the villages and towns of the surrounding tracts, and engaging in slaughter and captures, they set fire to granaries and spared no vestige of fertility. And when the stores and granaries of Burdwan were exhausted, and the supply of imported grains was also completely cut off, to avert death by starvation, human beings ate plantain roots, whilst animals were fed on the leaves of trees.
Page 25 - Burdwan, whose province had been the first cry out and the last to which plenty returned, died miserably towards the end of the famine, leaving a treasury so empty that the heir had to melt down the family plate, and when this was exhausted to beg a loan from the Government, in order to perform his father's obsequies.
Page 21 - Those murderous freebooters drowned in the rivers a large number of the people, after cutting off their ears, noses, and hands. Tying sacks of dirt to the mouths of others, they mangled and burnt them with indescribable tortures.
Page 25 - The ancient houses of Bengal, who had enjoyed a semi-independence under the Moghuls and whom the British Government subsequently acknowledged as the lords of the soil, fared still worse. From the year 1770 the ruin of two-thirds of the old aristocracy of Lower Bengal dates.