পাতা:Vanga Sahitya Parichaya Part 1.djvu/৫৫

এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা প্রয়োজন।

INTRODUCTION. 47 made in white marble, granite and sand-stone. But here in Bengal the images, with a very few exceptions, were, as has been stated, all made in black-stone. The faces of the images often show that spiritual bliss which is the struggle and the goal of the whole of Indian philosophy. When the face of a Väsudeva is decorated with Alakā and Tilakā and five lights are waved before the image by the priest, it appears, through the scented smoke and the lights, no material object, but a living joy at the altar of which the devotee is prepared to sacrifice every thing that is dear to him. The great temples dedicated to these deities had endowments of extensive lands for their maintenance; villages were turned into gardens to supply flowers for worship; when the bell of Årati rung in the evening, princes bent their crowned heads at their altars. When these images were mutilated and destroyed and their temples desecrated by profane hands, many bled to death to stop this scourge, but all in vain. To the Hindus of those days the loss of the household deity was what loss of all his treasure is to the miser. They remembered the dark-blue images of Väsudeva which no longer adorned their temples, till the colour itself became a symbol to remind them of their god and fill their minds with a maddening grief. It became a sore point in their memory, and their deep-rooted sorrow found solace in association with everything that bore that colour. The dark clouds, the collyrium Anjana, the dark blue waves of the Jumna, were a reminder to them, and hence dark-blue is a sacred colour with the Vaislavas of the present day. The reader will often find that this dark-blue colour was the object of passionate panegyric with our poet. He is not alone in eulogising the colour. All our Vaisnava poets, from Vidyāpati and Chandidas downwards, have done so. The dark colour of Krisia is no doubt mentioned in the earliar Sanskrit works. But nowhere else in the literature of India is there such lavish praise bestowed on it as we find in the Bengali poems of the Vaisravas after the advent of the Mahomedans. The Vaisnavas have tried to interpret the dark blue in a metaphysical way, as is the wont of the Hindus, disregarding the obvious historical facts. This, they say, is the pervading colour of the Universe, of the azure, of the sea and generally speaking of the landscape. As the main colour of the Universe this has been, they say, made the symbol of the Deity. There is a crown of peacock feathers on the head of Krisna which indicates a combination of other colours that decorate the main dark blue of the world. Others seem to maintain that the dark colour symboliges the mystery which enshrouds the Unseen and the Unknowable. Hence it is sacred with the Vaisnavas. For praises offered to this colour the reader is referred to pp. 52, 53, and 66 of this poem.