INTRODUCTION. 45 separated by a line of demarcation, but here the one merges in the other. Even politics here have sometimes risen to the level of religion as in the edicts of Ashoka. 4 Bengal. JMelo-drama. With the above remarks on the life of Chaitanya Deva and its bearing on the Vai nava songs, I shall introduce my foreign readers who are not acquainted with Bengali to the following translation of a Bengali work written by Krisnakamala Goswämi, born in 1810 A.D. Nearly the whole of the text translated here will be found on pages 1592-1620. For the sake of brevity I have omitted some passages of the original in my translation. The book is called the “Divyonmāda” or the “Divine Frenzy”. The author thus refers to the extensive popularity of this book in the preface to his poem the “Wichitra-Vilăsa”—“It seems to me that the public were well pleased with the two works—the Svapna-Vilăsa and the Divyonmāda; otherwise how is it to be explained that more than 20,000 copies of these books were sold within a very short time of their publication?” Thirty years ago there was hardly a man or woman in the Hindu communities of Eastern Bengal who could not reproduce from memory at least some songs from the Divyonmāda. This melo-drama which reads like a romantic tale of love, with all exuberance of the imagination of the Orient is not exactly what is seems to be, but is curiously enough an attempt to retell the story of Chaitanya's trances, which was more like a dream—too far removed from the materialistie world, to be appreciated by the purely rational mind. Rādhā is no Haidee dying of separation from Juan—no Dido expressing her agonies in a poetic language at being deserted by Eneas. She is the poetic symbol of spiritual experiences of a peculiar type which the Bengali Vaisravas had developed in the 16th century. For the right understanding of the illusion created in the mind of Rādhā by the sight of a cloud, the reader is referred to the ecstasies of Mādhavendra Puri, a devout Vaisnava, described in the Chaitanya Bhāgavata as follows:– “The story of Mādhavendra Puri is a marvel. He used to fall into a trance at the sight of a cloud.” Many of the mad utterances of Rādhā, to be found in the book, sound like the very sayings of Chaitanya Deva in his frenzied condition. For instance, on p. 56, where Rādhā attempts to name Krisna, and she falters after uttering the first letter, the passage is bodily imported from ChaitanyaCharitämrita” On p. 56 Bisākhā says that Rādhā while enthusiastically telling the story of her great love, suddenly breaks off and falls into a trance. There are many songs in Bengali describing how Chaitanya Deva, while speaking of Krissa to Swarupa Dāmodara suddenly stopped in
- The nuost authoritative biography of Chaitanyu Devu.
