Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal | Page 6

first symptoms of love. In No. 2,
Cha.n.di
/ Das represents two of Radha's Sakhis, or girl-friends,
whispering together as they watch her from a distance (the punctuation
{i.e. colon (:)} refers to the caesura, not to the sense):
"She stands outside the house, a hundred times restlessly she comes and
goes: depressed in mind, with frequent sighs, she looks towards the
kadamba jungle. Why has Rai (Radhika) become thus? serious is her
error, she has no fear of men, where are her senses, or what god has
possessed her? Constantly restless, she does not cover herself with the

corner of her robe: she sits still for a while, then rises with a start, her
ornaments fall with a clang. Youthful in age, of royal descent, and a
chaste maiden to boot: what does she desire, (why) does her longing
increase? I cannot understand her motives: from her conduct, this I
conceive, she has raised her hand to the moon: [Footnote: She has
formed some extravagant desire.] Cha.n.di
/ Das says with respect she
has fallen into the snare of the black one (K.rish.na)."
This poem vividly expresses the first symptoms of love dawning in the
girl's heart, and from a religious point of view the first awakenings of
consciousness of divine love in the soul. It is difficult for the European
mind, trained to draw a broad distinction between the love of God and
love for another human being, to enter into a state of feeling in which
the earthly and sensual is made a type of the heavenly and spiritual, but
a large-souled charity may be perhaps able to admit that by this process,
strange though it be to its own habits and experiences, there may have
been some improvement wrought in the inner life of men brought up in
other schools of thought; and my own experience, now of fourteen
years standing, enables me to say that Vaish.navism does, in spite of, or
perhaps in virtue of, its peculiar modus operandi, work a change for the
better on those who come under its influence.
Two more hymns on the same subject follow, and in No. 5 Radha
herself breaks silence.
"In the kadamba grove what man is (that) standing? What sort of word
coming is this: the plough of whose meaning has penetrated startlingly
the path of hearing? With a hint of union, with its manner of
penetrating making one well-nigh mad: My mind is agitated, it cannot
be still, streams flow from my eyes: I know not what manner of man it
is who utters such words: I see him not, my heart is perturbed, I cannot
stay in the house: My soul rests not, it flutters to and fro in hope of
seeing him: When she sees him, she will find her soul, quoth Urdbab
Das."
I have left myself no space to finish this Pallab, or to make remarks on
the peculiarities of the language, which in the older masters would
more properly be called old Maithila than Bengali. It is nearly identical

with the language still spoken in Tirhut, the ancient Mithili, and in
Munger and Bhagalpur, the ancient Magadha, than modern Bengali. As
the Aryan race grew and multiplied it naturally poured out its surplus
population in Bengal, and it is not only philologically obvious that
Bengali is nothing more than a further, and very modern development
of the extreme eastern dialect of Hindi. All these considerations,
however, I hope still further to develop at some future time.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Chaitanya and the Vaishnava
Poets of Bengal, by John Beames
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