Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/289

[V.] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. =. 253 means of cutting down the jungles and keeping the village-paths clear. In their utter helplessness they are driven to take refuge in God. The God of the snakes is also the God of men and by propitiating him they hope to avert the danger with which unaided they cannot cope. A consolation comes to them surely when thus resigned to His mercy. The goddess Manasa Devi who represents the divine power as seen in snakes has been a popular deity from very early times, but before her worship was recognised as a form of Cakti-worship, the followers of the Caiva-religion offered a great resistance to it, as indeed they did to the worship of all other local deities of the later Cakta-cult. The history of the struggle of the CGaivas with the worshippers of Cakti, which was long protracted, Local dei- is shrouded in the dark past. The flowers offered ea oe nised in to Cakti, as Agoka and Java for instance, are not the Gakta- we pantheon acceptable to the great Civa even now when that after a strife is over. The heroic firmness with which Chand fight with Sadagara, Dhanapati Sadagara and other followers Caivites of Civa adhered to their faith and offered resistance to the spread of the worship of the local deities of the Sakta-cult, found in our old poems, opensa vista through which we have a glimpse of the struggle, which at one time split the whole Hindu community | ) of Bengal. There is much that is crude in the poems on The personal Manasa Devi andthose on Chandi. This, however, gjement in proves that they once formed a part of the popular পি literature of the country before the people had come in contact with the refined classical taste of the Renaissance. The readers will have patiently