- Lived:
- born c. 1718 or 1723 at Halisahar (Kumarhatta), on the Hooghly north of Calcutta (Kolkata); died traditionally in 1775, though a document of 1794 bears what appears to be his signature — the life ran between a Calcutta counting-house and a riverside village, which is exactly the distance his songs cover
- Field:
- devotional poetry and song — Śākta bhakti, the worship of the Goddess; founder of Shyāmā Sangīt, the Bengali Kālī-song
- The Big Idea:
- He took the most terrifying deity in the Hindu imagination — Kālī of the cremation ground, black, garlanded with severed heads — and sang to her as a small, aggrieved son sings to his mother, complaints included. He did not soften her. He claimed her. Bengal has been singing along ever since.
- In their words:
- "You don't know how to farm, O mind. This human field lies fallow — tilled, it would have grown gold." (from one of his best-loved songs; the rendering is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- A Bengali clerk filled his employer's account books with songs to Kālī and was pensioned rather than punished — and the songs he went home to write turned the goddess of terror into somebody's mother.