New Books
By Victor A. van Bijlert
Malcolm McLean. Devoted to the Goddess: The Life and Works of Ramprasad. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1998. Pp. XIX, 205. ISBN 0-7914-3689-6 (hard cover). ISBN 0-7914-3690-X (paperback). Paperback $19.95.Ramprasad Sen was an 18th-century Bengali poet, whose songs in praise of the Goddess Kali did much to popularize the cult of the Mother Goddess in Bengal. In this lucid study, McLean brings a deconstructionist approach to bear on the textual evidence of the life and the compositions of Ramprasad. Avoiding fruitless searches for the 'real truth' about this poet, deconstruction reveals to McLean the way the story of Ramprasad's life and the poems attributed to him, 'worked' within and even outside a Shakto milieu in nineteenth-century Bengal. We eagerly await a follow-up study which would trace Ramprasad's influence down to the present.