The Charyapada, the Vaishnavas and the Shakta Poets

Bengali carries religious literature from several traditions, and its earliest surviving specimens belong to none of the ones a reader might expect. The Charyapada are Buddhist tantric songs of realisation, composed by siddhas in an early eastern Indo-Aryan form and preserved because a manuscript was found in Nepal, and they stand at the beginning of Bengali literature.

The Vaishnava movement that followed Chaitanya in the sixteenth century made Bengali a devotional language of the first rank. Its lyrics on Radha and Krishna, its lives of Chaitanya and its theology of divine love were composed in Bengali and in Brajabuli, a literary hybrid, and the kirtan tradition that carries them is still performed. Edward Dimock's study of the Sahajiya current examines the more esoteric wing of that world, whose practices were held closely and whose texts are deliberately obscure.

The Shakta poets are the other great strand. Ramprasad Sen in the eighteenth century, and the tradition after him translated by Rachel Fell McDermott, address Kali directly, argue with her, complain to her and refuse to let her go, in a register of intimacy with a terrifying goddess that has no close parallel elsewhere in Indian devotion.