Mangalkavya

Mangal-Kāvya (Bengali: মঙ্গলকাব্য, "Poems of Benediction") is a group of Bengali Hindu religious texts, composed more or less between 13th Century and 18th Century, notably consisting of narratives of indigenous deities of rural Bengal in the social scenario of the Middle Ages. The Mangal-Kāvyas usually give prominence to a particular deity amalgamated with a Vedic or Hindu mythological god and the narratives are usually written in the form of verses.

Manasā Mangal, Chandī Mangal and Dharma Mangal, the three major genus of Mangal-Kāvya tradition include the portrayal of the magnitude of Manasā, Chandī and Dharmathakur respectively. They are considered the greatest among all the native divinities in Bengal. But restraining the accounts of other deities, there are also minor Mangal-Kāvyas known as Shivāyana, Kālikā Mangal, Rāya Mangal, Shashtī Mangal, Sītalā Mangal and Kamalā Mangal etc. Each strain is composed by more than one poet or group of poets who are on the whole the worshipper of the god or goddess concerning their verses.

The Mangal-Kāvya tradition is an archetype of the synthesis between the Vedic and the popular folk culture of India. Lila Ray elaborates, "Indigenous myths and legends inherited from Indo-Aryan cultures began to blend and crystallise around popular deities and semi-mythological figures in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A new cosmogony was evolved, which is different from Sanskrit tradition but has an unmistakable affinity with the cosmogonic hymns in Rigveda and the Polynesian myth of creation".

The word Mangal-Kāvya comes out as an amalgamation of the two Bengali words, Mangal (Benediction) and Kavya (Poems). These are so named because it was believed that listening to these verses concerning the auspicious divinities would bring both spiritual and material benefits. Though some scholars of the early modern period tried to find out any other significance of the word Mangal that was frequently used in the medieval Bengali literature irrespective of any designated tradition. But all these speculations are now firmly discarded by the recent school of intellectuals.

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