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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
The author of the Rasakallola, Din Krishna Dás, was a Vaishnava or quasi-religious idler at the great temple of Jagannāth at Puri. He is popularly believed to be the son of the god. His mother was one of the female devotees who live
in the temple, and are, theoretically, chaste and virtuous. The lady in question, however, one fine morning, was delivered of a son, to the great scan dal of the highly virtuous society. Being asked how she came to do such a reprehensible thing, she related a long and somewhat confused story to the effect that one night as she was worship ping in the temple while all the others were
asleep, the god himself descended from his shrine, and honoured her with his society. The story so effectually accounted for the birth of Din Krish na, and so ingeniously removed all scandal from the sacred community, that it was eagerly taken up and bruited abroad. The boy was brought
[JULY 5, 1872.
fruit of the literary instincts which the Vaish nava creed awakened in Orissa, as it did in all
other parts of Aryan India. We now turn to the poem itself. It consists of 32 cantos (chhända) varying in length from 50 to 150 lines.
I have not counted the whole
poem, nor in fact have I as yet finished reading it all through, but from a cursory examination I should estimate it to contain about four thousand
lines. The metres are generally very light and graceful, and the poem was intended, as most of these poems are, to be sung. Indeed the Pan dits strongly object to our English habit of reading poetry, and affirm that the full beauty of the metres cannot be appreciated unless they are sung, i. e. chanted through the nose in a dolor
mately by the fact that some verses of his in
ous minor key. To our years this lugubrious whining, with the harsh voices which all Oriyas unfortunately possess, varied by an insane howl and accompanied by the dulcet tom-tom and the harmonious penny-whistle of the country, is not on the whole pleasing or enjoyable. Still de gustibus, &c. when read, the poem is certainly very pretty, and trips as lightly off the tongue as an Irish melody or a French chansonette.
praise of the reigning sovereign Purushottam Deb (A.D. 1478-1503) are still extant. These
The first canto is in a metre called Rāg Gujari ; and in reading poetry the final short
verses must have been written after that mon
a of Sanskrit words, which is usually dropped in prose or in speaking, must invariably be pro
up as a Vaishnava, and, as far as the Pandits of
the present day know, spent the whole of his un eventful life at Puri, composing poetry and dawdling about the courtyards and gateways of the temple. His date is ascertained approxi
arch's celebrated expedition to Conjeveram, and we may therefore place Dinkrishna Dás and his poem, the Rasakallola, at the close of the fif teenth century, that is a little less than four hundred years ago; three hundred years later than Chand the earliest Hindi poet. Dinkrishna is contemporary with the first Gujarati poet Narsingh Mehta of Junagadh, with Nanak Shah the Panjābi reformer, with Kabir and Keshab Dâs of Hindustan, and with Vidyapati of Ben gal. Most of these authors were followers of
the new Vaishnava doctrines, and though Vish nu, under his form of Jagannāth, had long been worshipped in Orissa, yet the restoration of his temple, and we may suspect, his complete iden tification with Vishnu as the supreme being, only date from two hundred years earlier, if the an
nalists of the province may be believed.
There
nounced. It sounds however like a very short 5. In this metre no account is taken of long or short syllables; each consonant with the vowel attached to it is regarded as an instant or unit of the verse (mätra), at the eighth instant there must be a caesura (jati), and after the caesura five more instants, the whole verse (charan) thus consisting of thirteen instants, and the cou plet (pada) of twenty-six. Thus in the two first lines we must scan thus (I mark off each instant
by and the caesura by |)— Ka ra så dhu |ja|na mā |nes |ma | na ku e Ika”
Ka ra dhi |re | dhyā na | ni lä8 || cha | la | ná | ye |ka |. This first canto opens with an invitation to all good men to meditate on Krishna whose praises
is some doubt about the point, as many other
are then set forth.
signs seem to show that the ancient Siva wor
preme god, and even Siva and Brahmā worship
ship was prevalent in Orissa till a much later date, in fact until Chaitanya himself, by his visit to the province, introduced his distinctive tenets.
him. The last six lines invoke the protection of the god on the poet and his poem. They run
Be this as it may, and the subject is one which cannot be entered into here, it is evident hat in the poem before us we have the earliest
He is declared to be the su
thus:—
Karumã Sãgara sågaraja-nāyaka, Kara abhaya abhayabara-dāyaka Kashta-mahidhara mahidhara-kantaka
