Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kali and Uma in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal.

• Author: Seely, Clinton B.
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kali and Uma in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal. By RACHEL FELL MCDERMOTT. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. ix + 437. $65.

Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal. By RACHEL FELL MCDERMOTT. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. viii + 189. $19.95 (paper).

We have here a comprehensive study of the rich tradition of Bangla (a.k.a. Bengali) Sakta song literature, replete with ample illustrations. These two books, companion pieces, complement each other beautifully. One gives the reader a diachronic account of the environment within which Bangla Sakta songs were and still are composed. The other presents an anthology of the Sakta songs themselves, in McDermott's adept translations.

Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams chronicles the rise(s) and decline(s) of goddess worship, generally known in English as Saktism, within the context of exoteric or popular Hinduism as practiced in the region of Bengal from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Furthermore, it also traces the evolution of Bangla Saktism from something that can be identified as tantric to something that is clearly bhakti in nature. The study is bifurcated, covering the same two hundred and fifty years from two perspectives. The first half of the book concentrates on biographies of the Sakta poets, beginning with the estimable and first of the Bengali Sakta lyricist-devotees, Ramprasad Sen (ca. 1718-1775). The second half examines the songs these lyricist-devotees sang. And there is a third focus, which pervades the entire book, that of the goddess herself, in her two main aspects of Kali (the goddess as mother of the devotee, but also the frightening all-powerful deity) and Uma (the goddess as the devotee's daughter).

For the book's first part, McDermott makes extensive use of primary historical texts and also draws upon her thorough survey of Bangla- and English-language secondary source materials. We get a vivid picture, for instance, of the later Mughal period through the advent of the British in the area of the Hugli river north of Kolkata, an area that includes Ramprasad's home turf. The author augments her narration with anthropological data collected over a number of years and several trips to the region. For this first part, also, but even more so for the book's second part, the primary documents upon which the author bases much of her historical account are the lyrics...