DUKHI SHYAMDAS born at Hariharpur Village is another notable poet who also added tune to his composition. His two books are worth-mentioning. Gobinda mangal and Ekadashibrata . In Govindamangal he depicted the colourful character of Govinda, i,e, Srikrishna and in Ekadashibrata his main attempt was to formulate some rites and rituals for the lay Vaishnavas. As a devout poet he would sing his own songs and travel here and there attracting notice of the landlords and pious persons, who rewarded him with landed properties in recognition of his songs and poems, Perhaps Dukhi Shyamdas was indebted for his theme of Radha-Krishna and Gopis to another great Vaishnaba poet Maladhar Basu , who composed Srikrishna Vijoy Kavya .
GOBORDHAN DAS is another poet of sweet lyrical songs
and Padas in the Vaishnava line, He was born in a village near
Keshiary and his ‘Gurubhai' (fellow disciple of the same preacher) Kanuram Das was no less than nine padakarta's whose verses
were also recited and sung by other devotees of the locality. He
was born in the village Dharenda near Kharagpur.
BASUDEV GHOSH , a composer of Vaishnava padavalis of
first rank, was not a man of this district, but spent the greater
part of his life here and wrote most of his treatises and padavalis
while staying at Tamluk. As a direct follower of Sri Chaitnya he
had had the splendid oppertunity to keenly watch and study the
traits and movements of that colossal personality, and thus his
writings has got a historical value. The mysterious passing away
of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu at Puri was a bolt from the blue to
him and the entire Vaishnava world, and he made a wooden
image of the Mahaprabhu at Tamluk , began worshipping Him as
an incarnation of Srikrishna Himself. In this way the whole of
Midnapore embraced Vaishnava cult in the 17th century and up to
day that is not wiped out even after turmoil's of various religions
and sectarian influx and so much modernization and reformation.
The advent of RAMESWAR BHATTACHARYA the popular poet of the ‘Sivayan' in the early 18 th century, marks distinct change in the literary pursuits of this district. Of course, Kavikankan Mukundaram, being his predecessor, appeared to him as a path maker. His voice was the Voice of common man, the string of the throbbing hearts of the living people. Simple religion or metaphysics did not lure him to compose any song for the god Siva. He is rather tended to depict the day-to-day life of the mass, men and women of the society around him. As a son of the soil he really felt for the people and song for them and not as a skylark soaring high above in the sky. He was not at all a Preaching poet. Sivayan falls in the group of the Mangal Kavyas which were sung from Mangal to Mangal (Tuesday to Tuesday) on with the intention of good luck to the house-holder. The intimate household pictures of Siva and Gouri have been drawn in italics lines in this book of verse. The beautiful Pictures resemble those of the family life of an ordinary peasant or a day labour. It is the joys and sorrows of country life that moved the poet to take his pen. His characterisation of the gods and goddesses and dwellers of Kaliasha or other holy and hilly places are no other than the men of Midnapur rather, Bengali stuff Jadupur, a village in the Ghatal sub-division, was the birth place of the poet. But he had to leave his own ‘native village under torture of the landlord Hemat Singh and take shelter with the chief of Karnagarh, Rajaram Singh . Rajaram's son Yosobanta Singh garlanded him as a poet of his court and encouraged him to compare poems. Rameswar, well-versed in Sanskrit language, gave a new shape of his poetic creation setting aside the old ideals of religious preaching. It was in 1712 A.D., that his Kavya was first read out or sung in the court. His Kavya became a very popular piece of poetry along with his another book, Satyanarayan Panchali .
Another writer of Chandimangal was AKINCHAN CHAKRAVARTI , who was born in the village Atghara of Ghatal, near Jadupur, in the second half of the 18th century, Chandimangal , Sitalamangal and Gangamangal show his brilieant power of artistic creation with a fine sense of beauty and aesthetic culture, that are rarely found in the writings of 17th or 18th century poets excepting a few.
Mangal Kavyas may well he classified in three broad sections
1) one, those of Vaishnavik cult
2) second, of Puranic and
3) the third of local or of folk-culture. |
