Amāniśā to Akālbodhan

Languages are not merely a medium of communication. They are also repositories of the collective consciousness of the people who speak them. Their sorrows, stories, fears and hopes remain gathered in the layers of words for centuries. The closeness of two languages, therefore, cannot be measured by the similarity of their words alone.

They draw near to each other when the same kinds of darkness and the same kinds of dreams are nurtured within them. Hindi and Bengali are both daughters of Sanskrit, but to say only this is to diminish their intimacy. Both were nurtured by one and the same Purāṇic memory.

The brightest proof of this intimacy is a poem that can, without exaggeration, be counted among the greatest works of Hindi poetry: Nirālā's “Rām kī Śaktipūjā.” In its craftsmanship, metrical design, imagery and depth of meaning, it can stand alongside the finest poems in any language. Even so, to regard it as the exclusive property of Hindi is to lose half its meaning. Its narrative foundation comes from the Bengali Rāmāyaṇa, while its soul is nourished by Bengal's Śākta consciousness. This article seeks to understand that relationship, from Amāniśā, where the poem begins, to Akālbodhan, where it reaches its culmination.

Nirālā's childhood was spent in Bengal. The estate of Mahiṣādal, where his father served as a soldier, was itself part of Bengal's cultural consciousness. His formal education was limited, but through self-study he acquired a knowledge of Hindi, Sanskrit, English and Bengali. His command of Bengali was so strong that he translated Bankimcandra's novels, the Śrīrāmakṛṣṇa-vacanāmṛta and Vivekānanda's Rāja Yoga into Hindi. He also produced verse translations of several poems by Rabīndranāth and Vivekānanda. Hindi critics have repeatedly pointed to the influence of Bengali on the idiom, rhythm and sensibility of his poetic language. This contact was not merely intellectual; it was also a lived experience. In the Bengal where Nirālā grew up, the arrival of the goddess, her worship and her immersion were celebrated every autumn in homes and pandals. Thus, when he composed the story of the autumn new-moon night and the untimely invocation of the goddess, he was drawing on more than a literary source. He was returning to a childhood memory, something he had heard and witnessed. His personal life, too, was marked by grief and struggle. His wife died when he was young, and shortly before he wrote this poem, his daughter Saroj died.

In the literary world, he endured constant opposition, neglect and poverty. For a poet who had himself experienced defeat and struggle, it is hardly surprising that weariness and doubt should find their way into his Rāma. At times, therefore, the Rāma of this poem seems to resemble Nirālā himself.

The fifteenth-century Kṛttivāsī Rāmāyaṇa is as deeply embedded in the Bengali imagination as Tulsī's Mānas is in North India. One of its distinctive features, however, is an episode absent from Tulsī: Akālbodhan. “Akāl” means untimely, a time that falls outside the prescribed order, while “bodhan” means awakening.

According to the śāstra, the proper time for the goddess's worship is the spring Navarātra. Autumn is when she sleeps. At the moment of extreme crisis, before the slaying of Rāvaṇa, Rāma must awaken the goddess during this very period of sleep. The seeds of this episode lie in the Purāṇas, and it is associated with the tradition of the Kālikāpurāṇa, but the credit for establishing it in Bengal's popular consciousness belongs to Kṛttivāsa.

Even today, this story is regarded as the foundation of Bengal's autumn Durgā Pūjā. A profound question lies hidden within it. When life itself is at stake, can the prescribed rite be transgressed? Are the rules greater than human existence, or are they ultimately meant to protect it? In Kṛttivāsa, Brahmā's counsel resolves the question. The transgression takes place with the permission of the gods, and Rāma performs the worship as an obedient priest.

There is conflict, but it remains ritual rather than existential. Nirālā takes this same story to an entirely different plane.

The poem opens as dusk draws to a close. After a full day of battle, the sun is setting, and the approaching night is a new-moon night.

The first architectural decision is worth noting: Nirālā begins his epic not at the outbreak of war but on the night following the inconclusive fighting of the first day. The poem begins at the moment when Rāma is at his weakest.

Here, the identification of nature with the mind is especially intense. The sense of direction is lost, the wind is still, and darkness seems to surge from the sky and pour down upon the earth. This darkness is not merely external; it is also the darkness of Rāma's mind.

The defining characteristic of Chāyāvād is the unity of nature and the inner state of mind, and here that unity reaches its deepest expression. The moonless night outside and the night of defeat within dissolve into one another.

The language itself creates this darkness. The diction, laden with tatsama words and alliteration, places a certain weight upon the reader. Sentences flow from one line into the next, leaving little room to breathe.

The language does not merely describe the subject; it makes the experience happen within its own body.

Now set this alongside the memory of Bengal. The new moon of Mahālaya marks the transition from Pitṛpakṣa to Devīpakṣa, the beginning of new life at the point closest to death. In Śākta philosophy, the goddess presides over both creation and destruction; her invocation, therefore, emerges from the womb of an ending, from the heart of darkness. Nirālā's Amāniśā is a poetic echo of this very night of dark time. The poem may be called “the worship of Śakti,” but its first breath is the absence of Śakti.

The memory of the war returns through Rāma's eyes, shaped by the state of mind that follows defeat. Rāma's side has neither lost nor won, but for Rāma, the absence of victory amounts to defeat, and that feeling has settled deep within him. Here, Rāma is not an avatāra. He is a man who has begun to doubt his own dharma.

The most moving moment in this sorrow comes when tears fall from the eyes of the hero renowned for his composure. The memory of Sītā rises within him, and the poem makes a remarkable shift.

The language grows tender, and the scene of their first meeting in the flower garden comes into view, when their eyes first met. Sound gives way to colour and sweetness. This shift is a profound poetic device. At the heart of that memory lies the eye, the meeting of gazes.

At the poem's climax, Rāma is prepared to offer his own eye. The eye that once beheld Sītā is the very eye he now offers to the goddess. The first moment of love and the final moment of self-sacrifice are bound together through one and the same organ. The memory planted at the beginning of the poem becomes the seed of its ending.

Within this same passage of sorrow comes Rāma's realisation, the ideological centre of the poem: where injustice stands, Śakti stands on that side too (“anyāy jidhar hai, udhar śakti”). This line is more than a mythological observation; it carries the weight of historical experience. The poem was written in 1936, when the subcontinent was under colonial rule and society, confronted by the material power of empire, stood weary, divided and uncertain. Rāma becomes a symbol both of that subjugated nation and of the poet himself.

We now arrive at the poem's decisive thread. Into this despair comes Jāmbavān's counsel. In Kṛttivāsa, Brahmā plays this role. Nirālā assigns it to Jāmbavān, and the change is significant. Brahmā is the creator of the world of the gods; Jāmbavān is an experienced companion on the battlefield. The counsel no longer descends from heaven as a divine command.

Instead, it rises from within the camp, from the wisdom of an elder comrade. Jāmbavān urges Rāma to make a “maulik kalpanā” of Śakti. This phrase is the key to understanding the poem. “Kalpa” here refers to the mode of worship, the order and rules governing its performance. “Maulik kalpanā,” therefore, means creating one's own mode of worship—and doing so at a time when, according to the śāstra, worship should not take place at all.

Jāmbavān does not tell Rāma to follow an established rule. He tells him to create his own kalpa and establish his own time of worship, even if that time is an akāl.

Bengal's worship traditions are closely connected with this word. There, on Ṣaṣṭhī, the awakening of the goddess is accompanied by “Kalpārambha,” the beginning of the prescribed mode of worship. In Kṛttivāsa's story, this kalpa is granted by Brahmā: the rule comes from outside, from above, already established. In Nirālā, the rule does not come from outside; the sādhaka must create it for himself.

In this respect, Nirālā moves beyond Kṛttivāsa. In Kṛttivāsa, the akāl is a problem resolved by the gods. In Nirālā, it becomes the space in which human beings demonstrate their originality.

When the time prescribed by the śāstra has passed and every established rule has lost its power, only one's own kalpa remains. From this perspective, the poem also becomes the poet's manifesto.

The man who challenged the authority of fixed metre and expanded the boundaries of poetic language held a particular view of life: accomplishment comes not from inherited rules but from a rule of one's own making.

For the subjugated subcontinent, too, this carried a message. When power stands on the other side, it is an illusion to believe that it will automatically come over to ours. It must be awakened through a rule of our own making. In Bankim's “Vande Mātaram,” the motherland was imagined in the form of Durgā and Kālī, while the subjugated nation itself became the goddess who had to be awakened in the akāl of crisis.

Nirālā carries this Bengali imagination of Śakti into Hindi, but takes it a step further. There, the goddess is an external power whose shelter one must seek. Here, the sādhaka creates her through his own kalpa and awakens her.

The middle of the poem describes sādhanā. Rāma sits down to worship the goddess, and Hanumān brings one hundred and eight blue lotuses. Nirālā does not merely construct the external ritual; he also traces the inner journey of the sādhaka.

Rāma's mind rises step by step, crossing the stages of the cakras and approaching the Ājñā-cakra.

This is the language of Śākta-Tāntric yoga, in which the goddess is both an image of divinity and the energy sleeping within the human being. The awakening, therefore, takes place inwardly, and the “bodhan” belongs both to the goddess and to Rāma himself. The sādhanā also contains an element of trial.

The goddess does not grant her boon easily. Just as the ritual is about to be completed, with only one lotus remaining, Rāma discovers that one lotus is missing: the goddess has taken it away.

The tension reaches its peak. Until this point, the worship has followed the prescribed rules; from here on, the ritual reaches the limits of those rules, and something beyond them begins.

Rāma does not waver. He remembers his mother's affectionate name for him, “Rājīvanayan,” and raises his arrow to offer one of his eyes. Here, maulik kalpanā reaches its culmination.

The prescribed offering of lotuses has come to an end, so Rāma creates his own kalpa, making his own body the means of worship.

This is Nirālā's answer to the question of Akālbodhan: when the rules are no longer sufficient, let the human being offer himself. Rāma asks nothing of the goddess; he offers himself unconditionally.

Then the goddess appears, stays his hand and calls him “Puruṣottam navīn.” The word “navīn” is laden with meaning. Rāma was already Puruṣottam, but now he earns this title through his own struggle and self-sacrifice.

The goddess does not then disappear; she merges into Rāma's face. In the Kṛttivāsī story, Śakti bestows her grace from outside; here, she is absorbed within him.

The power sought outside had been within all along, and sādhanā becomes the means of awakening it. This Advaitic idea is found neither in Kṛttivāsa nor in the Purāṇas; it is Nirālā's own contribution.

In Bengal's Śākta devotion, humility and rebellion coexist. The devotee bows before the goddess but also questions and complains to her.

Nirālā's Rāma embodies the same duality. He is humble, yet when the rules fail, he does not wait; he makes his own decision. This is not a repetition of tradition but its dialectical transformation, one that both accepts and transcends it.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume, on the basis of this interpretation, that the flow of influence moves in only one direction. The exchange between languages is never one-way. Nirālā's Rāma himself bears witness to this.

In the Hindi tradition, whose summit is Tulsī, Rāma is Maryādā Puruṣottam, steadfast and unshaken. In the Bengali tradition, Rāma often appears in a gentler, more human form.

Nirālā's Rāma brings these two traditions together, combining the steadfastness associated with the Hindi region with Bengal's tearful tenderness.

Bengal, too, has received much from the Hindi region, and this debt is an old one. The padāvalī of the Maithili poet Vidyāpati exerted such an influence on Bengal's Vaiṣṇava poets that a poetic language called Brajabuli emerged there, in which verses were composed for centuries.

The young Rabīndranāth wrote his Bhānusiṃha Ṭhākurer Padāvalī in this very language. The centre of Caitanya Mahāprabhu's devotion was Vṛndāvan, the land of Braj. Kabīr's voice travelled to Bengal and took root in the consciousness of its saints and Bāuls. Meanwhile, Bankim's “Vande Mātaram,” travelling north, became a rallying cry of the freedom struggle in the Hindi-speaking region. This relationship is visible in festivals as well.

In North India, Vijayādaśamī celebrates Rāma's victory over Rāvaṇa; in Bengal, around the same time, it marks the worship and farewell of the goddess. Two regions, two memories, one date.

Nirālā's poem binds them together because Rāma himself worships the goddess. The Rāma of the Hindi region and the Durgā of Bengal, once celebrated in separate festivals, stand face to face on the same stage.

The journey begins with Amāniśā and ends with Akālbodhan. Between the two unfolds the entire course of the poem: from defeat to awakening, from doubt to resolve. Nirālā takes Kṛttivāsa's akāl and turns it into the occasion for his own kalpa. Out of the dense darkness of Amāniśā, which holds the memories of both Kṛttivāsa and the Kālikāpurāṇa, he creates a new light that is neither wholly Bengali nor wholly Hindi. It is the voice of a shared poetic consciousness, belonging to both.

The true strength of the literature of the Indian subcontinent lies in this multilingual undercurrent.