Just before the Turkic invasion in 1204 CE, Bengal experienced
an astonishing period of creative activity and a great flourishing of classical
learning. The last two Sena kings of Bengal, Ballālasena and Lakṣmaṇasena, not
only patronised a large number of poets and commissioned a vast number of literary
works, they were also great poets and classically trained scholars in their own
right.
It was an age where the erudition of a king was an important
mark of his kingship. The great Rāja Bhoja (11th century) wrote
treatises on architecture, aesthetics and philosophy; the Chālukya king,
Someśvara III, wrote the famous Mānasollāsa, an encyclopaedic treatise
covering a wide range of topics, including society, politics, music, literature
and science. It was as if the Indian kings had a premonition of what was to
come and felt an urgent need to complete their intellectual projects for
posterity.
The flourishing of the sciences, literature, and art during
the 11th- 13th century was largely due to the support and
sponsorship of the Indian rulers. The kings of Kashmir provided patronage to
vast networks of scholars and philosophers; the Gāhaḍavāla dynasty commissioned
the writing of dharmaśāstra nibandhas and made Banaras the centre of Indian
intellectual life; the Mithila kings made their kingdom an epicentre of
Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika scholarship; the Malwa kingdom made great advancements in
aesthetics and architecture; the Yādava kings of Maharashtra were prolific
patrons of music, art and literature. This is but a fraction of intellectual
activity in the Indian courts during the centuries before the Islamic invasion
— I have not even mentioned the classical scholarship that existed in the
courts of Kaliṇga, Cholā or Hoysalas.
All this received a grievous setback with the establishment
of the Delhi Sultanate, whose epistemic and religious orientation was not very
favourable towards Hindu arts and literature. In this short essay, I will
attempt to provide a glimpse of the flourishing intellectual scene in Bengal
just before its invasion.
Bengal during the Sena Years
In terms of its artistic and literary achievement, the ‘golden
era’ of Bengal corresponds roughly to the reign of Ballālasena and Lakṣmaṇasena
between 1160-1206 CE. It was under Sena rule that the famous ṭols of
Navadvīpa were established. To these ṭols can be traced the origins of
the Navadvīpa school which produced the great naiyāyikas (scholars of Nyaya
philosophy) and the smṛiti writers of the 16th century.1 However, during the 12th century, the Sena kings generally focussed
on Sanskrit kāvya and the revival of Hindu ethics and rituals
literature.
The Sena king, Ballālasena, with the help of his preceptor
Aniruddha, composed vast compendia entitled ‘sāgaras’ or ‘seas’ on topics
related to ethics, rituals and dharma. These five ‘seas’ are called the
Sea of Consecrating Temples (Pratiṣṭhāsāgara); the Sea of Good Conduct (Ācārasāgara);
the Sea of Religious Observances (Vratasāgara); the Sea of Giving (Dānasāgara);
and, finally, the Sea of Magical Powers (Adbhutasāgara).2 The last work, left
unfinished by Ballālasena, was completed by Lakṣhmaṇasena.
These are works of prodigious learning covering almost every
conceivable topic on Hindu ethics and dharma. The Dānasāgara, for
instance, is a seven hundred pages long Sanskrit text devoted exclusively to
the theories of gift-giving. It exhaustively covers the various gifts and rituals
associated with gift-giving, the role of the giver and the receiver, and the
dharmic imperative for giving gifts. In general, this period witnessed a flurry
of dharmaśāstra digest compositions by the kings who were engaged in fighting
the Turkic invaders, be they the kings of Banaras, Mithila, Maharashtra or
Bengal. A magisterial corpus of dharma was one means of moral and
cultural unity in that fight.3 These vast compendia were monuments of the
accumulated sanātana culture that reminded the kings of what was at stake in their
fight against the turakṣas.
Lakṣmaṇasena, the son of Ballālasena and the last well-known
king of the Sena dynasty, was a prolific patron of kāvya literature. Some of
the great poets of that age — Dhoyī, Jayadeva, Śaraṇa, Umāpatidhara, and
Govardhana — were writing under his patronage. Most of their compositions are not available to us.
However, some fragments of their work are preserved in one of the earliest
Sanskrit anthologies, Saduktikaraṇāmr̥ta of Srīdhardāsa, composed in
1205 CE during the twilight years of Lakṣhmaṇasena. This anthology gives a
selection of more than two thousand stanzas from five hundred authors and poets.
Such Sanskrit anthologies grant us a glimpse of the sheer richness and quantity
of Sanskrit kāvyas being produced during this period.
Fortunately, there are two surviving kāvya of these famous
poets at the court of Lakṣmaṇasena.
Dhoyī, the poet laureate of the Sena dynasty, composed the famous
dūtakāvya (messenger poem) Pāvanadūta (wind-messenger), a short poetical
work of 104 stanzas in the mandakrānta meter in imitation of the celebrated
poem of Kālidāsa, Meghadūta. This is probably the first dūtakāvya
composed in the style of Kālidāsa. After Dhoyī, more than thirty-five such
dūtakāvyas were composed by Indian poets during the next few hundred years.4
Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda is too well-known to need any
introduction. This short poem, known all across India for its stirring lyrical
quality and its evocation of śṛṇgārarasa, stands as an epitome of Bengal’s
contribution to Sanskrit literature. It is hard to imagine Vaiṣṇava poetry and
painting without the overwhelming influence of Jayadeva’s masterpiece. The poem
has a quasi-scriptural status in Bengal and Orissa Vaiṣṇavism. Jayadeva’s
illustrious literary career flourished under the patronage of the highly
erudite Lakṣmaṇasena, who is described by the epithet “Highest Vaiṣṇava” (paramavaiṣṇava).5 It is a grievous loss that just one poem of Jayadeva has survived.
Other than literature and dharmaśāstra, there were
intellectual luminaires in Lakṣmaṇasena’s court such as Halayudha Miśra who
wrote voluminous scholarly works on mīmāṃsā, Vedic rituals, grammar and
sectarian religious manuals. He was one among the many scholar-pandits in the Sena
court who were prodigiously learned in different branches of Hindu śāstras
and smṛitis. Based on scholarly production during that time, it seems
that Bengal was one of the great centres of Hindu learning in India.
Bengal after the Senas
However, the implantation of Islamic rule in Bengal during
the 13th century proved a great setback for classical learning and
scholarship. With the collapse of patronage, Sanskritic learning and literary
activity came to a grinding halt. For the next three hundred years, not much Sanskrit
literature emerged out of Bengal (as far as I am aware). There were just a few
exceptions. The educational ṭols, which had gained prominence during the
Sena dynasty, continued to function, albeit in a much-constrained manner. These
institutions continued to produce classically trained scholars. This period,
however, saw some seminal Bengali-Sanskrit compositions – the Kṛttivāsī
Rāmāyaṇ composed by Bengali poet Krittivas Ojha and the Vaiṣṇava poetry of Chandidas.
The next
intellectual renaissance of Bengal would take place in the 16th
century during the reign of the Hussain Shāhi, an unexpectedly liberal patron
of classical Hindu learning and scholarship. It was during this period that one
of the greatest philosophers of the age, the Mithila trained naiyāyika, Raghunātha
Śiromaṇi, established his ṭol in Bengal’s Navadvīpa to teach the next
generation of Navya-Nyāya scholars. Navadvīpa, along with Banaras, emerged as
the premier centre of scholarship in medieval India. These naiyāikas wrote
scholarly texts on almost every branch of knowledge known to them: metaphysics,
grammar, logic, mathematics, law and linguistics. Furthermore, during that epoch,
Bengal produced the greatest Vedāntin of the age, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, the
great Dharmaśāstra scholar Raghunandana, whose works established the Bengal
school of Hindu Law, and also the great Tantra scholar Kṛṣṇānanda Āgamavāgīśa.
This era of astonishing scientific, literary and
philosophical activity eventually came to a close during the tumultuous decades
of the 18th century, following British conquest and the gradual
economic impoverishment of Bengal under colonial rule (see here). A century or so later,
during the colonial period, there was a re-emergence of intellectual and
artistic life, sometimes dubbed as ‘Bengal Renaissance’, but this British-inflected
revival spluttered and came to a halt around the time of independence.
To conclude, Bengal’s contribution to the pan India
Sanskritic civilisation is seminal but has not received the scholarly interest such
vast written monuments of Bengal Sanskrit culture deserve. For instance, the
very important work, Ballālasena’s Dānasagara has not been translated
into English or any other Indian language. Similarly, except for a few popular
Navya-Nyāya manuals, almost none of the work of the great Naiyāyikas of Bengal
have been translated. The works of Madhusūdana Sarasvatī and Raghunandana also await
urgent scholarly attention. The new generation of Bengalis (and Indians) need
to be made aware of their vast intellectual inheritance, which did not begin
with Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
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