Striped God of Sundarbans: Stories of Tigers and their overlord in a 17th Century Bengali Kāvya

Samayita Banerjee , Association Asie-Sorbonne (1)

1 CREOPS - Centre de Recherches sur l’Extrême Orient de Paris-Sorbonne

(The animal in the Asian imagination: alter or alter ego? International conference organized by the Asia-Sorbonne Association, January 13 and 14, 2023) This paper looks closely at the Raya Mangal of Krishnaram Das written in the later part of the 17th century. It is the story of the deity Dakshin Raya, the ‘Lord of the South’ and Lord of the Tigers, who caters to the area of the Sundarbans and its adjoining villages in West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh. The story takes us to the geographically defined space of the forest, because a large part of the deity’s realm are the mangrove forests in the delta of the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers. This physical space has been the natural habitat of the Royal Bengal Tiger, and humans have lived in close proximity to them for centuries. The environmental conditions of this region have caused and continue to cause confrontation between human and natural forces. The cultic developments that took place here, Dakshin Raya being one of many, represent the impact of these every day confrontations on the cultural nuances of society. Composed between the 15th and the 18th centuries, Mangal Kavyas mark an important phase of literary imagination in Bengal. They have been widely read by scholars to understand the religious, political, and cultural milieu they depict. This paper, however, will shift the gaze from human actors to non-human ones and read the text as a pre-colonial attempt to understand the impact of human actions on the environment. The central focus will be tigers, as this text appears as a tale of terrified tigers narrating their encounters with humans. The aim is to describe and delineate the tiger–human relationship that is a reality within the text and outside of it, and thus to understand the stage that is the forest. It will show how the forest finds representation, within a pre-colonial text, as a space that was civilized and often domestic, just as it is every day in reality.

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Héritage culturel et muséologie

Samayita Banerjee, Association Asie-Sorbonne. Striped God of Sundarbans: Stories of Tigers and their overlord in a 17th Century Bengali Kāvya. 2023. ⟨hal-04055060⟩