Tarakeshwar and Its History – Rajat Kanta Roy
Sudhir Kumar Mitra. Tarakeshwar Itikatha. Prak-Shatabarsher Smaran—1, Calcutta 2007, pp 109, Rs. 60
Tarakeshwar is only 36 miles from Kolkata. People actually walk there. Yet it is a world apart from Kolkata. It has its own history.
The historian of this place is Sudhir Kumar Mitra. He wrote its history in 1953. What he wrote was an authentic local history. His family has re-published this interesting little booklet, with excellent notes.
Sudhir Kumar Mitra was born to the Mitra family of Jejur in Hugli district and was a devout Vaishnava. He belonged to the Kayastha caste. All these were important identities in his make-up. He also turned out to be a meticulous antiquarian and obtained justly earned fame by his massive Bengali language history of Hugli. The history of Tarakeshwar was published separately and on a smaller scale it exhibits the same meticulous research. He also wrote numerous biographies and other works. All this while he was employed in Kolkata as the Burra Baboo of a reputed British firm. He was also at one time the head of the Congress Committee in Jejur. One curious fact about him is that he was a collector and an antiquarian. He collected old manuscripts, documents, letters, coins, books, stamps, terracotta objects and so on. Original pieces of evidence are what matter in history. From the angle, an antiquarian is superior to a historian, and an archaeologist is superior to an antiquarian. Mitra was quite an antiquarian, and though he did not dig, he was good on old buildings, temples and mosques. This is evident in his history of Tarakeshwar.
Not that the Math in Tarakeshwar, for which the place is famous, is too old an institution. Mitra has concluded that Math came up in 1729, during the rule of the autonomous Nawabs of Bengal.
During the rise of the Banaras Raj in the eighteenth century, a Rajput family was driven to Nawabi Bengal and they settled near the place, which was then a jungle. The old legends relate that a Bengali cowherd of the Rajput family discovered a cow giving milk to a stone in the jungle. The Rajput family built small shrine over the stone, and donated the land for its worship. The Rajas of Burdwan rebuilt the shrine later, but this, too, proved too small as numerous pilgrims thronged there for curing themselves of disease. Gobardhan Rakshit of Hugli district then built the present temple, but the older shrine can still be detected within.
Mukundram Ghosh, the Goala who first discovered the stone idol, was the first sebait. After his death, however, the temple passed into the control of the notorious line of the Giris. They belonged to the Dashnami Naga sect. As Mitra points out, this was a non-Bengali religious sect, and Tarakeshwar became the headquarters of the sect in Bengal, and a major Shaiva shrine.
The administration of the temple by the Giri line of Mahants turned out be scandalous. There were two major Tarakeshwar scandals in the nineteenth century. The first happened in 1824. The then Mahant, Shrimant Giri, was hanged for murder in that year. He kept a prostitute for his ‘religious works’, but the prostitute had a paramour. The Mahant stabbed him in the bowels and killed him, and was hanged for the crime. The second case happened in 1873, and this was the well-known Elokeshi-Mahant case. The Mahant of the time, Madhab Giri, seduced a Brahmin housewife named Elokeshi. The husband, Nabin, murdered Elokeshi. Both husband and paramour went to jail, but upon his release, the Mahant assumed charge of the temple. Later, in 1924, C. R. Das led the famous Tarakeshwar Satyagraha against the maladministration of the Mahants. A managing committee was the result, and the Mahants could no longer do what they liked.
It has been mentioned before that a Bengali cowherd was the original sebait of the temple. Mitra mentions an interesting fact relating to his daughter’s descendants. In course of time, Tarakeshwar became the site of a popular festival of the hook-swinging variety. This was a genuine popular festival, distinct from the temple where the Giris dislodged the Goalas. The chief Gajan Sannyasi of the Charak festival is always the descendent of the original Goala on his dauther’s side.
The Rajput family which endowed the temple and the line of the Giri Mahants have remained members of the temple managing committee. The Charak festival, however, is out of their purview.
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