ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of a critical episode in Kavikaṅkaṇa Mukundarāma Cakravarti’s Caṇḍī-maṅgala, composed in late sixteenth-century Bengal. The episode describes the building of a city by the hunter Kālaketu, in response to a command by the goddess Caṇḍī, to institute her worship on earth. Kālaketu is commanded to place her temple in his royal palace, built by divine artisans, within a newly founded city described with an unusual wealth of social and material detail. The Caṇḍī-maṅgala belongs to a class of performative religious poems called maṅgalakāvyas, celebrating gods, goddesses, and saints venerated in folk religion. The genre engages with a human world of action and adventure, domesticity and worldly concerns, reflecting the changing religious and political economy of late medieval and early modern Bengal. The imagined city of the Caṇḍī-maṅgala is a richly plural civic space, embracing different religions, castes, classes, and professions and yields important insights about the urbanization of religion and its claiming of the city.
