( 1718 - 1778 )
Ramprasad Sen was a Bengali Hindu poet-saint who worshipped the Divine in its female aspect, as Kali or the Mother Goddess. He was an exemplar of "bhakti yoga", charactersized by practice of direct and intensely personal forms of relationship with the Divine Reality.
Ramprasad's poetry expresses a passionate mysticism, filled with intense longing and struggle. He addresses the Mother Goddess in all of Her seemingly contradictory aspects—as loving mother and "the Dark One', as the Transcendental Reality and a disreputable trickster embodying the forces of "maya" or illusion.
While Ramprasad's relationship to the Divine Mother seems at times petulant, irreverent, even blasphemous, such forms of address and acknowledgment are occasionally employed in Indian devotional verse, and do not contradict his bhakti orientation. Ramprasad translators Leonard Nathan and Clinton Seely write:
[This] convention is a means of revealing the power in that relation, once established, to transform every kind of emotion—hostile as well as loving— into devotional passion through the act of total concentration on the deity. [It also exhibits] what is essential in the relations between devotee and deity.
For when Ramprasad accuses Kali of indifference, he is
also suggesting her total detachment from the world, the very quality that
he needs to achieve for release, just as when he acesses her of shameless
nakedness, intoxication, and madness, he is, in fact, cataloguing some
of her most potent attributes: the awesome presence of real being, without
the conventional covering of appearance; the joy of true freedom, and its
refusal to be contained in rational or moral categories.... The convention
of accusation and insult, in short, provides Ramprasad with an intensity
and depth of feeling to match the awesome crisis of salvation.
links
Ramprasad
Giri's biography
Shree Maa Sings the Songs of Ramprasad
Essemian
Sanctuary of the Darkside Goddess
bibliography
Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair:
Selected Poems to the Mother Goddess
Ramprasad Sen
Translated by Leonard Nathan and Clinton Seeley.
Boulder, Colo.: Great Eastern, 1982.
excerpt, poems 7 and 17:
Ramaprasad's Devotional Songs:
The Cult of Shakti.
By Jadunath Sinha.
Calcutta: India Publishing House, 1966.
ISBN: 0-913922-18-8
(225 pp.)
Devoted to the Goddess :
The Life and Work of Ramprasad
(Suny Series in Hindu Studies)
Malcolm McLean
Paperback/Published 1998
State
University of New York Press
information and order from:
amazon.com
| * | barnes
and noble
Mother of the Universe:
Visions of the Goddess
and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment
by Lex Hixon
from vedanta.com
information and order from:
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